Understanding consumer online shopping behaviour from the perspective of transaction costs

4.5 QUESTIONNAIRE DEVELOPMENT 
A multi-stage process was employed for the development of the questionnaire that was used 
in the survey. First, this study generated a pool of items that tapped the domain of each 
construct based on previous validated research. The literature on consumer behaviour, 
marketing, online retailing and information system (Pavlou and Chellappa 2001, Anderson 
and Srinivasan 2003, Lee and Lin 2005, Kim and Li 2009b, Kim
 et al.
2011, Wu
 et al.
2014) 
was a guide to generate and refine the scales. Operationalizations of the variables included in 
this study and their measures will be delineated in detail in the next section. 
The second stage of questionnaire development involved a back-to-back translation 
procedure. As the questionnaire was administered in Chinese, to ensure the validity of the 
translation, the translation procedure outlined by Wagner et al. (1987) was adopted. First, all 
original items were translated into Chinese by one professional translator whose native 
language was Chinese. Then, a second professional translator independently translated the 
items back to English. Further, the two translators confirmed the meaning of the Chinese 
version by comparing the two English versions.

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The third stage of questionnaire development involved an expert evaluation. To ensure 
content validity and the appropriateness of items being investigated, the purification 
processes by means of expert judgement to address the relevance and completeness of scale 
items drawn from the literature were adopted. The study provided five senior academic 
experts from different universities who possessed expertise in the area of consumer behaviour, 
online retailing and TCT with the construct definitions, corresponding items and a set of 
instructions for judging (Teo and Yu 2005). The expert judges were asked to rate each item 
as, “not representative”, “somewhat representative”, or “very representative” to the construct 
definition (Subrahmanyan 2004). After receiving the expert-judges’ feedback, decisions 
about which items to delete or keep were based on a three-stage procedure: a synthesis of the 
sumscore approach and the complete approach increasing in level of sophistication at each 
stage was adopted resulting in a draft set of 99 items.
In the final stage of questionnaire development, the study pre-tested the draft survey with 30 
online shoppers and asked them to complete the draft questionnaire. These online shoppers 
are recruited from the streets and excluded from the main sample used for hypotheses testing. 
Prior to the pre-test, participants were made aware that the study had received ethics approval 
from the Tasmanian Social Sciences Human Research Ethics Committee. Upon completion 
discussions were held with them about the items in the questionnaire focusing on item 
comprehension, logic, and relevance. Specifically, the study asked these online shoppers 
whether they could think of more than one way to interpret each item and to report these 
interpretations, and explain why they responded the way they did on each item. Having 
completed the in-depth interview with online shoppers, no serious problems with any of the 
items were reported. Thus, 99 items were retained in the final survey. Finally, the two initial 

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translators rechecked the final version and compiled the final Chinese questionnaire. The 
final items used in the questionnaire are listed in the Appendix E.
The questionnaire consisted of seven sections. Section 1 aimed to gather background 
information about demographic characteristics of the respondents. Section 2 was designed to 
collect the respondents-related characteristics of online shopping and conditions required for 
online shopping, such as the internet access availability, perceived internet expertise, online 
buying frequency and their risk-bearing propensity. Section 3 focused on the respondents’ 
perceptions about the online environments/channels, for instance, their perceived 
convenience, perceived enjoyment, privacy and security concerns, and environmental 
uncertainty. Section 4 consisted of questions about online purchases. Respondents needed to 
specify the products/services and the online store’s name where they made the most recent 
online purchase. The amount of items and buying frequency from the online store were also 
required. Section 5 aimed to gather respondents’ perceptions about the TCs of purchasing 
products/services from the online store. In Section 6, the focus was on collecting data that 
showed the respondents’ perceptions about the online vendor, including the product quality, 
site design, e-service quality and store reputation. The emphasis of Section 7 was on 
collecting data relating to respondents’ satisfaction with and loyalty towards the online store.