Measuring the Involvement Construct

TLDR: The Personal In-volvement Inventory was developed over four data sets of 268 undergraduate psychology students, two data set of 49 MBA students, and two data sets with 57 clerical and administrative staff members as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: SUMMARY The purpose of the study was to develop a scale tomeasure the construct of involvement. Hence, a se-mantic differential scale was developed to capture theconcept of involvement for products. This Personal In-volvement Inventory was developed over four data setsof 268 undergraduate psychology students; two data setswith 49 MBA students; and two data sets with 57 clericaland administrative staflf members. The scale was dem-onstrated to have content validity by expert judges attwo phases of the scale development: first, for the se-lection of items, and second, through classification ofopen-ended responses from subjects. The reliability orstability of the scale over time was checked over twosubject populations for an average test-retest correlationof 0.90. The criterion-related validity of the scale waschecked by demonstrating agreement with the order ofvarious products as found in previous studies. The con-struct validity—the test ofthe scale to theoretical prop-ositions—was then carried out. The scale was admin-istered to clerical and administrative staff and coveredthree different product categories and several statementsof behavior proposed to be representative of involve-ment. Over all three product categories there was a pos-itive relationship between the scale scores and the sub-jects' responses to the statements of theoretical prop-ositions pertaining to involvement.