The importance of proper measurement

Question

What is a problem encountered with the measurement process?

Answer 1

Lack of clarity or specificity. Many characteristics of interest to a marketing researcher are much harder to measure because of the difficulty of devising rules to assess the true value of these consumer attributes. e.g. brand loyalty, purchase intent, total family income.

Answer 2

Difficult to locate and gain the cooperation of respondents for a second testing.

First measurement may alter a person's response on the second measurement.

Environmental or personal factors may change, causing the second measurement to change.

Answer 3

Difficulties of test-retest reliability can be avoided by creating equivalent forms of a measurement instrument.

Answer 4

Very difficult, impossible, to create two totally equivalent forms.

If equivalence can be achieved, it may not be worth time, trouble and expense involved.

Answer 5

Ability to produce similar results when different samples are used to measure a phenomenon during the same time period.

Cronbach alpha technique

Answer 6

Predictive validity: degree to which a future level of a criterion variable can be forecast by a current measurement scale.

Concurrent validity: degree to which another variable, measured at the same point in time as the variable of interest, can be predicted by the measurement instrument.

e.g. the ability of a home pregnancy test to accurately determine whether a woman is pregnant right now. Relationship between predictor variable and criterion variable.

Answer 7

No, reliability is a pre-condition for validity.

Answer 8

- Carefully defining precisely what to be measured
- Exhaustive literature research and focus groups to identify all possible items for inclusion on the scale
- Ask panel of experts for their opinions
- Scale could be pretested and an open-ended question asked that might identify other items to be included