A COMPARISON OF ENGLISH VERSUS ARABIC FOR A SOFTWARE PIRACY INSTRUMENT

As part of a broader research project directed toward development of a more comprehensive software piracy model, the authors collected two sets of data from students at the Kuwait University. The software piracy instrument was translated from English to Arabic. Then, both the English version and the Arabic version were administered to college of business undergraduate students at Kuwait University during different semesters. This paper presents a comparison of the two samples from Kuwait students in light of a proposed equity software piracy model. The Kuwait samples will be analyzed first to determine if there are significant differences between the students in the two samples and then using factor analysis to determine if language differences significantly impacted the results. Because English is not well spoken in all Arabic countries, a case can be made that the instrument translated in Arabic may be useful for data collection in other Arabic countries if there are no significant differences. These results will prove helpful in an attempt to incorporate a cultural factor into software piracy models to make them more generalizable.

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