Measurement in Marketing

5Design of a Measurement Scale

OBJECTIVES OF THE CHAPTER.–

This chapter underlines the quantitative and qualitative attributes of a measurement scale. Its objectives are to:

• – present the main quantitative (number of items and response modalities), verbal (formulation of items and response labels) and presentation (position of labels, numbering, etc.) components of a measurement scale;
• – highlight the main design choices of a measurement scale;
• – point out the importance of the different variants of a scale in producing valid content for the phenomenon to be measured;
• – guide decisions associated with the design of a measurement scale.

5.1. Introduction

In the previous chapter, we discussed the main steps in building a multiitem reflective measurement scale. However, this is not sufficient to reflect all the decisions to be made in this process because these steps specify the general procedure to be followed, but do not say anything about the formulation of items that may be better than others or about the response formats associated with the scale that may be more efficient in the processes of data collection and analysis, etc. The quality of an instrument is largely determined by the number of items, the labels (words) used, the formulation of the items, the number of response modalities, the numbering associated with them, the existence or not of response labels and/or numbers, the type of scale (Likert, semantic differential, etc.), etc.

Reflections on the scale ...