Gordon C Bruner

The book is the seventh volume of the Marketing Scales Handbook series, the oldest and most comprehensive set of books that describe and review multi-item scales (survey questions) that have been used by scholars in the study of consumer behavior. The wide variety of scales in Volume 7 are for use in surveys and experiments when studying issues relevant to understanding consumers or similar groups of people such as viewers, shoppers, patients, or citizens. To be included in the volume, the scales had to be composed of at least three items and have empirical evidence of their psychometric quality. Using those general guidelines, hundreds of articles published in the top marketing journals during a two-year period (2010-2011) were examined. Ultimately, 364 scales were identified as meeting the stated criteria and were reviewed for the volume. Each review provides the scale items as well as information regarding the measure's origin, previous users, and measurement quality.Because the studies using these scales have been published in top academic journals, it is possible to judge their quality. The hope is that researchers will consider it better to build on the work of experts and adopt their measures rather than spending time themselves developing scales from scratch, or worse, using simplistic survey questions of dubious quality. The precision and reliability of these scales increases the accuracy of measurement and, thereby, should improve the quality of decisions based upon their results.

Which measurement scales have been used the most in consumer insight research? Dr. Bruner, author of the classic Marketing Scales Handbook series, set out to answer that question. After reviewing several thousand multi-item measures used in scholarly research of consumer issues, it was clear that some scales had been used much more than others. Twenty of those are the focus of the book. Not only do these "top 20" indicate what is popular with marketing scholars but the book provides details about how to precisely measure some of the most important individual factors that shape consumer behavior including attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand, purchase intention, satisfaction, and loyalty.The book is meant for researchers in a variety of fields who want reliable measures for their surveys and/or experiments. Instead of using simplistic measures of dubious quality or, at the other extreme, having to build and refine measures from scratch, researchers can use the book to learn from the experts who have already crafted quality measures. By using better scales, accuracy is increased which, thereby, improves the results of analyses and the decisions based upon them.