Volume 3 - Marketing Scales Handbook

VOLUME III

The first two volumes of this series were published in 1992 and 1996 and quickly became best sellers for AMA. This third volume covers the scales that were reported in articles published from 1994 to 1997. As with Volume II, this new book should not be viewed as a revision of the previously published material. That is because scales from the first two volumes were not automatically included in this third book. In fact, as is discussed further below, the contents of this third volume are predominately new. Unless a scale reported in the first two volumes was used again during the 1994 to 1997 period it was not included in V. III. The first two volumes have hundreds of scales not contained here. Given that, V. III is properly viewed as complementing V. I and II rather than superseding them.

In addition to the time period covered, a few other differences between V. III and the previous volumes should be noted. It was clear rather quickly when working on this new volume that many more scales were being used in our field than could be reviewed in the time available. Several steps were taken to reduce the work involved in examining all of the scales. First, more uses were treated as "see also" than in the past. As before, some were treated this way because insufficient information was available to enable us to provide a reasonable description of the items used and/or a scale's psychometric quality. More than in the past, however, we treated some uses for which we had plenty of information as "see also" because there were so many total uses that we did not feel it necessary to describe every single use in detail. Thus, this volume introduces selected uses for several scales, e.g., Attitude Toward the Ad, Social Desirability Bias, Involvement (Enduring), and Role Ambiguity. We still tried to cite every known usage in the domain reviewed but only four to six uses were described in detail.

A second cut we were forced to make has to do with the domain of journals covered. The six from the first volume are still included: Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research. Volume II introduced two more: the Journal of Retailing and the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management (JPSSM). Unfortunately, we simply ran out of time to review scales reported in JPSSM. We will try to streamline our review process even further for V. IV so that JPSSM can be included again. Despite this cut, the sales-related scales appear to be well covered quite well.

As with the first two volumes, only multi-item scales were reviewed. As we did in V. II, scales were only reviewed if they had three items or more. Further, a minimum amount of information was required for a scale to be described. The most important information was scale items and reliability.

Readers are urged to take care in the selection of scales. Naive scale users would do well to read up on psychometrics in order to improve their ability to evaluate alternative measures and make a selection. A suggested reading list is provided at the end of the book from which a rich explanation of psychometric issues can be found.

This volume is divided into sections as the previous volumes were. The first group of scales (402) relate to consumer behavior. The second section, the smallest (83 scales), is related to advertising measures. The third section is composed of scales used in something other than consumer research. The majority of the scales come from studies of sales people, marketing management, or product distributors. For the first time in the series, this is the largest section (456 scales).

We have attempted to describe scales of like constructs that use similar sets of items together. Our rule was that if scales appeared to be measuring the same thing and had about half or more items in common then they were written-up together. This means that there are many cases where substantially different scales for the same or similar constructs exist (e.g., #5-#9). This rule was very hard to apply with respect to two scales: the semantic differential versions of Attitude-toward-the-Product/Brand (#53) and Attitude-toward-the-Ad (#439, #442, and #445). Although these two have been the most popular constructs to measure in scholarly marketing research using multi-item scales there has been little agreement on how to measure them, i.e., they both have been measured dozens of ways with dozens of items. Several years of working with the hodgepodge of Attitude-Toward-the-Ad scales led to an initial grouping, however. A full explanation of the logic and analysis that led to the grouping has been published. (See full cite for Bruner 1998 in Readings section). Unfortunately, similar efforts to unravel the mess of scales purporting to measure Attitude-Toward-the-Product/Brand have not been as successful. Given that, many measures have been written up together because at least on the surface they appear to be measuring the same construct in roughly the same way (multiple semantic differentials) even if they do not share items in common.

The Table of Contents can be viewed to see a listing of the scales included in V. III.

Comments: Dr. Gordon C. Bruner II

Office of Scale Research