Validation of the writing process questionnaire in two Hispanic populations: Spain and Mexico

Abstract

Thesis work is the first important research where the PhD candidate has to take primary responsibility for their work. Sometimes it is forgotten, or at least not enough attention is paid to the fact, that for many PhD students it is also the first time they have to face such a complex, ultimately self-regulated learning task (Sachs, 2002, p.99) as thesis writing. But what do the protagonists think about it? There is a gap in the literature concerning studies that focus on PhD students’ writing conceptions as a main target. The aim of this study was to validate the structure of the Writing Process Questionnaire developed by Lonka and her colleagues (Lonka et al., 2014). To do this, we asked two groups of 631 Spanish and 431 Mexican PhD students to complete the questionnaire, and used Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM) to assess the validity of a hypothesized 6-factor model, and to test its invariance across the two groups.

The results confirmed the broad 6-factor structure of the questionnaire but indicated that the knowledge transforming sub-scale needed to be revised into a more specific knowledge creation factor. This modified structure generalized across both the Spanish and Mexican samples. We suggest that the revised structure for the knowledge transforming factor reflects the fact that these two groups of Spanish-speaking PhD students perceive the development of knowledge in writing as a solitary rather than a collaborative process. Our research provides evidence that the Writing Process Questionnaire is a reliable and generalizable measure, having shown strong invariance properties in the two populations studied.