Testing the convergent- and predictive validity of a multi-dimensional belief-based scale for attitude towards personal safety on public bus/ minibus for long-distance trips in Ghana: A SEM analysis

We examined the predictive validity of the public bus passenger safety attitude scale (PBPSAS), a measure of
personal safety attitude (PSA), to predict future intention to use public bus/minibus for long-distance trips. Using
510 adults, we tested among other things the hypothesis that PSA has a positive significant effect on future
intentions to use public bus/minibus for long-distance trips. Data analyses involved: (1) descriptive analyses of
measure reliabilities and the strength and evaluation of people’s safety-related beliefs, (2) fitting measurement
and structural models to determine the factorial structure of PSA and (3) path analysis to examine the relationships
between two different measures for personal safety-related attitude (indirect (belief-based) measure
for PSA and a direct measure) and future intentions to use public bus/minibus for long-distance trips. Data
analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics 25 and AMOS 24. We found that: (1) a second-order factor
model provides a more parsimonious framework for explaining PSA than a three-factor model, (2) the indirect
measure for attitude towards personal safety has convergent validity, (3) PSA has a positive significant effect on
both a direct measure for attitude towards personal safety on public bus/minibus, and future intention to use
public bus/minibus for long-distance trips and (4) that the direct measure for attitude towards personal safety
also has a positive significant effect on the future intention to use public bus/minibus. We thus conclude that
PBPSAS is a useful instrument for measuring PSA and is valid in predicting future intentions to use public bus/
minibus for long-distance trips.