A Comment on the Estimation of the Reliability of Multidimensional Marketing Constructs: A Store Personality Scale Application

摘要

Notwithstanding the prevalence of multidimensional constructs in marketing research, very few reliability analyses have taken into account the multidimensional structure of their empirical data. In this article, the author argues that if a scale can be divided into two or more distinct though related dimensions, its internal consistency should be evaluated by coefficients designed for such cases. This article presents stratified alpha as a viable alternative to the common practices of computing alpha for the whole scale and averaging alpha values. It also illustrates, using D'Astous and Levesque's store personality scale, that the discrepancy between stratified alpha and alpha (or alpha mean) might be substantial. Thus, it would seem more scientifically sound to compute and report stratified.alpha.