Progress is a Process

Today I had another session with my coach. Currently I am editing my survey and the final 'tweaks' are in sight. One of the questions I faced during drafting the survey was the scale development. Considering my topic, a 5-point Likert or 7-point would suffice so therefore this post is about lessons learned along the way when drafting a survey covering new marketing instruments and to be tested marketing instruments such as the opinion leadership-scale. 

 

Similarly, attitude is the most widely measured attribute in marketing, and the findings should generalize to other concrete attributes, such as beliefs or perceptions, intentions, and satisfaction. Theoretical tests and empirical findings would be unchanged if good single-item measures were substituted for these constructs in place of commonly used multiple-item measures (Bergkvist and Rossiter, 2007).

Lessons learned

• When using marketing constructs which were used in other studies and measured on a 7-point scale and the rest of your constructs are to be measured on a 5-point scale: bring them all in line;
• Try to trim down the number of items by first assesing the construct's concreteness. If the object can be conceptualized as concrete and singular, it does not require multiple itemts to represent it in the measure and if the attribute can be conceptualized as concrete, it does not require multiple items either;
• If you have multiple items belonging to multiple objects (or variables, or as I just called them ''marketing instruments), randomize them and play with the order of the items. Don't forget where you put them in the survey. Here is a helpfull tool which I used: Randomize Items;
• When you have two separate surveys measuring separate groups, such as users and non-users of an online platform, make sure you have a sufficient N for both cases. In my case I have two organizations but mostly users, but the non-users is the group that can help me get the most usefull information: non-adoption reasons.

Reminder to myself: when I will finish my thesis, I will post a couple of the instruments I used in my survey. I can not post the whole survey, but I will share some of the results and the validity of the instruments I used.