Abstract:

Peru is the country in the region that is most concerned with corruption, mainly political and financial, as expressed by 68% of Peruvians. Surveys on Corruption Perception, clearly differentiated between corruption and “micro-corruption” giving the impression that it is feasible to “moderate” corrupt behaviors.

Therefore, arriving at a working definition of “corruption” entails understanding that it not only alludes to situations confined to political behaviors with widespread media and social, political, or economic impacts, but also includes what Aristoteles considers “the opposite of virtue.” This is possibly associated with specific cultural variables. This study approaches the concept of corruption from the sociocultural perspective, defining corruption as a behavior that violates not only written rules but also those that society establishes implicitly. In this sense, corruption encompasses all conduct that deviates from a society’s moral norms.

The main goal of this study was to build an instrument to present commonplace behaviors related to corruption and furthermore, to determine the instrument’s evidence of validity and reliability in university students. In principle, the instrument comprised 25 items, grouped into two dimensions (unlawful acts from the behavioral repertoire and unlawful acts from the cultural repertoire).

The validity evidence based on content was obtained consulting ten experts on matters associated with commonplace behaviors and corruption who reviewed the proposal and determined that five items had to be deleted.

As for evidence based on its internal structure, the instrument was applied to 340 students from a private university in Lima, Peru (230 females and 110 males), who were studying Psychology and Communications, with ages ranging between 17 and 29 years (M = 20.1; SD = 2.1). The KMO coefficient was 0.86 and the Bartlett’s test of sphericity yielded the result 1415.6 (p < 0.001) as per the exploratory factor analysis. The factor extraction method of Unweighted Least Squares was used, and the Kaiser rule was applied to determine the number of factors, which suggested that there was a single factor that was underlying the 19 items, accounting for 22.5% of construct variance. Factor loadings exceeded 0.30. In addition, the reliability obtained from internal consistency (α = 0.83; ω = 0.84) is considered to be good.

When analyzing the responses to the items, we found that, at least once: out of every 10 students, nine had purchased a counterfeit product; eight had lied to their parents about where they were; seven had copied on an exam and had lied to a professor to justify an absence from class; six had kept the change when they had mistakenly been returned more money than was correct, had cut into a line, had lied about their age to obtain an advantage, and had kept something lent despite knowing that it should be returned; among other behaviors.

This study shows that the Peruvian university system has the great opportunity to revalue existing practices, incorporate new activities, topics and spaces for reflection, with the objective of assessing seriously the implications of relativizing, minimizing, ignoring or confusing the concept of corruption.

Keywords:

Corruption, common behaviors, university students, Peru, validity evidence, reliability evidence.