Development of Family Triadic Measures for Children's Purchase Influence

Abstract

Many past investigations of family members’ perceptions of their relative influence in family decision making show a lack of convergence in multiple reports. This, in turn, represents a serious threat to validity in attempts to depict the structure of family decision influence. These studies warn against using single-item measures of family members’ influence even in cases involving multiple respondents. In this study, using multiple-respondent, multiple-item data, the authors develop triadic measures of children's influence in four categories of product purchase decisions that exhibit desirable levels of convergent and discriminant validity. The process of measure development and validation demonstrates a methodology that combines the traditional measure purification process, confirmatory factor analysis, and multiple-influence, multiple-rater data analysis procedures.