Formative versus reflective measurement models: two applications of formative measurement | NOVA. The University of Newcastle's Digital Repository

By T. Coltman, Timothy M. Devinney, David F. Midgley, S. Venaik. 2008

1,309 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents a framework that helps researchers to design and validate both formative and reflective measurement models. The framework draws from the existing literature and includes both theoretical and empirical considerations. Two important examples, one from international business and one from marketing, illustrate the use of the framework. Both examples concern constructs that are fundamental to theory-building in these disciplines, and constructs that most scholars measure reflectively. In contrast, applying the framework suggests that a formative measurement model may be more appropriate. These results reinforce the need for all researchers to justify, both theoretically and empirically, their choice of measurement model. Use of an incorrect measurement model undermines the content validity of constructs, misrepresents the structural relationships between them, and ultimately lowers the usefulness of management theories for business researchers and practitioners. The main contribution of this paper is to question the unthinking assumption of reflective measurement seen in much of the business literature.

Subfields: Accounting, Management Information Systems, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c022979e93f100bd7687e683058096bdcbaf194

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Citations in the corpus

Ethical Leadership and Employee Green Behavior: A Multilevel Moderated Mediation Analysis (2020, background): “Coltman [71] documented three theoretical (construct nature, the direction of causality between items and latent construct, and item characteristics) and three empirical (item intercorrelation, the relationships of items and constructs, and measurement error) considerations to distinguish between re”
Formative Vs. Reflective Measurement Model: Guidelines for Structural Equation Modeling Research (2020, background): “them, and ultimately lowers the usefulness of the research findings ([14]; [15]; [20]).”
Do Food Image and Food Neophobia Affect Tourist Intention to Visit a Destination? The Case of Australia (2019, methodology): “We assessed the formative model of cognitive food image from the theoretical and empirical perspectives using the frameworks suggested by Coltman et al. (2008) and Hair, Hult, Ringle, and Sarstedt (2017), which emphasize three criteria: nature of the construct, direction of causality, and…”
Store Environment, Personality Factors and Impulse Buying Behavior in Egypt: The Mediating Roles of Shop Enjoyment and Impulse Buying Tendencies (2015, methodology): “[14,18,30]), we treated personality construct in our model as a second order reflective construct with three variables (i.”
Cultural intelligence: A theory-based, short form measure (2015, methodology): “measurement models” (Coltman et al., 2008: 2). Therefore we took several additional steps to establish the validity of the SFCQ scale similar to the scale validation procedure used by Judge, Erez, Bono, and Thoresen (2003) in their work on core self-evaluations and also as recommended by DeVellis (2”
Exploring Opportunities and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Higher Education Institutions (2021, methodology): “According to the Fornell–Larcker criterion in 1981, discriminant validity is obtained when the square root of each construct’s average variance extracted (AVE) is greater than the correlation with all other indicators [44,45].”
Tales of the unexpected: Integrating career shocks in the contemporary careers literature (2018, neutral): “It is quite common in the careers literature to build instruments that are of a reflective nature, that is, items share a common theme, are interchangeable, and internal consistency is crucial (Coltman, Devinney, Midgley, & Venaik, 2008).”
Cross-functional integration and functional coordination in purchasing and supply management: Antecedents and effects on purchasing and firm performance (2013, methodology): “We chose to retain the two items of insignificant path weights in order not to neglect theoretical considerations or to substantially reduce content depth of the constructs (Bollen and Lennox, 1991; Coltman et al., 2008).”