Introduction and cross-cultural adaptation of Research Competency Questionnaire in Graduate Students

Valid governments rely heavily on their high quality educational systems. As a result, they must prioritize quality of education assessment. In order to assess the quality of educational systems, several indicators such as researcher training and research competencies have been presented. Due to the lack of appropriate instrument about Research Competencies in Iran, we have decided to apply the Swank and Lambie Research Competencies Scale which was developed in 2016, as the main instrument in this study. The purpose of this research is normalizing aforementioned scale between graduate educators in behavioral science in Tehran. The sample size was estimated about 346 amongst graduate students studying in universities of Tehran. Research competency is a formative construct and in a formative measurement, it is better to use principal component analysis (PCA) instead of factor analysis (FA). The results led to five items elimination. Final components including qualitative research, quantitative research, research inquiry/literature review, research ethics, sampling methods, writing skill, discussion skills/publish articles and research tools. Descriptive outputs also showed that research ethics in graduate students is in its highest level, however, they showed poor performance in qualitative research. In addition, research competency is higher in PhD student in comparison with M.A students. The results can be beneficial in detecting student’s research needs. Moreover, it is recommended to conduct a qualitative research in order to identify the weaknesses and fundamental flaws of students in some areas of research.