A Trustworthiness of Commercial Airline Pilots (T-CAP) Scale for Indian Consumers

A Trustworthiness of Commercial Airline Pilots (T-CAP) Scale was created for the purpose of measuring consumer perceptions about the trustworthiness of pilots in India. Previous research has used several different types of trust and trustworthiness scales, but none of them focus on pilot trustworthiness, particularly with an Indian consumer base. This paper outlines the process by which we validated the scale and tested reliability. We had 679 participants join in the process of determining the items that belonged in the scale, narrowing down the choices to highly relevant items, and testing the final scale. A factor analysis using the principle components and varimax rotation produced a single factor for the condition of trustworthiness, and all the items strongly loaded on this one factor. Reliability was tested via Cronbach’s Alpha and Guttmann’s Split-half test. Finally, the scale was tested in an experimental setting to determine discriminability. All tests provided evidence of high validity, reliability and discriminability.