Technical Reports - Office of Scale Research

SIMILARITY ANALYSIS OF THREE ATTITUDE-TOWARD-THE-WEBSITE SCALES

As e-commerce continues to change business as we know it, a construct is growing in popularity for researchers to study: attitude-toward-the-website (Aws). Several alternative scales for measuring the construct are available but it is not known if they are equally good at measuring the construct. The purpose of the study is to compare three such scales and to do so by reintroducing a technique called similarity analysis that has been little used in our field since it was first proposed. The paper explains how the approach draws from both exploratory and confirmatory methods and is especially suited for assessing scale quality in studies such as pretests and pilot tests that have small sample sizes. The analysis shows that the Aws scales are not psychometrically equivalent. Further, the results of an experiment indicate that depending upon which scale is used in a study, different conclusions could be drawn.

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Comments: Dr. Gordon C. Bruner II