Abstract
Chapter 2 described the proposed conceptual model that is used to understand the adoption, usage, and impact of broadband from the consumer perspective. Chapter 3 described the appropriate research approach for testing the hypotheses and to validate the proposed conceptual model. From Chapter 3 it was concluded that the survey research approach is an appropriate method to investigate the issue of broadband diffusion. Further suggestions that were provided in Chapter 3 are before conducting the final data collection a reliable survey instrument should be developed and validated. Validating an instrument is a critical step before testing a conceptual model (Boudreau et al., 2001; Straub et al., 2004). This is due to the rigour of the findings and interpretations in positivist research that are based on the solid validation of the instruments used to gather data (Boudreau et al., 2001; Straub et al., 2004). Therefore, this chapter aims to describe the development of a survey instrument designed to investigate broadband adoption, usage, and impact within UK households. By undertaking the following three stages, this led to the development of a reliable instrument: (1) to explain broadband adoption behaviour some initial factors were identified from the literature and then a decision upon how to determine them in an exploratory survey approach needed to be made; (2) content validation was performed on the itemed pools that resulted from the exploratory survey. The purpose of this step was to confirm the representativeness of items to a particular construct domain and, finally, (3) a pre-test and a pilot test were conducted utilising the obtained instrument after content validation was undertaken in order to confirm the reliability of the measures.The next section briefly re-introduces the conceptual model and provides a list of the constructs included in the various stages of the validation process. Following this, an overview of the instrument development process is provided. Then the first stage of the validation process (i.e., the exploratory survey) is presented and discussed. This is followed by the content validation process. The instrument testing process that includes the pre-test and pilot-test is described before presenting the summary of the chapter.