The Software Infrastructure Attitude Scale (SIAS): A Questionnaire Instrument for Measuring Professionals' Attitudes Toward Technical and Sociotechnical Infrastructure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Context: Recent software engineering (SE) research has highlighted the need for sociotechnical research, implying a demand for customized psychometric scales. Objective: We define the concepts of technical and sociotechnical infrastructure in software engineering, and develop and validate a psychometric scale that measures attitudes toward them. Method: Grounded in theories of infrastructure, attitudes, and prior work on psychometric measurement, we defined the target constructs and generated scale items. The scale was administered to 225 software professionals and evaluated using a split sample. We conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on one half of the sample to uncover the underlying factor structure and performed a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the other half to validate the structure. Further analyses with the whole sample assessed face, criterion-related, and discriminant validity. Results: EFA supported a two-factor structure (technical and sociotechnical infrastructure), accounting for 65% of the total variance with strong loadings. CFA confirmed excellent model fit. Face and content validity were supported by the item content reflecting cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. Both subscales were correlated with job satisfaction, perceived autonomy, and feedback from the job itself, supporting convergent validity. Regression analysis supported criterion-related validity, while the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMT), the Fornell-Larcker criterion, and model comparison all supported discriminant validity. Discussion: The resulting scale is a valid instrument for measuring attitudes toward technical and sociotechnical infrastructure in software engineering research. Our work contributes to ongoing efforts to integrate psychological measurement rigor into empirical and behavioral software engineering research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".