Survey and Measurement Development in R

In this chapter we will explore the use of surveys in marketing research and the importance of reliability and validity in measurement. We will begin the scale development process and perform exploratory data analysis on freshly-collected survey data.

Now that we have cleaned and summarized our survey results, we will look for hidden patterns in the data using exploratory factor analysis. These patterns form the basis of developing “factors” of an unobserved or latent variable. Of particular interest in this stage of survey development is internal reliability, or whether similar items in the survey produce similar scores.

Does the data as collected agree with prior beliefs about the latent variable of interest? In this chapter, we will use confirmatory factor analysis to formally test the hypothesis that our model fits our data. We can now answer the question of construct validity, or: “are we really measuring what we are claiming to measure?”

In this chapter we will use our newly validated scale to test its relationship to demographic variables like age or spending habits. We will also confirm the reproducibility and replicability of the survey. Finally, we will explore the power of factor scores in modeling customer behavior.