DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONSUMER HOPE SCALES: TRAIT …



Consumer Hope Scale: Development and Validation of

Dispositional and Situational Measures

This research details the development and validation of measures to assess consumer hope. We develop both dispositional and situational measures to capture the three dimensions of hope; “to hope”, “to have hope”, and “to be hopeful.” Results supported the scale’s reliability and its discriminant and nomological validity. Our domain-specific dispositional consumer hope measure predicted consumer outcomes, such as subjective knowledge, better than domain-general alternatives. Furthermore, our context-specific situational consumer hope measure in the context of healthy food choice, predicted food-related outcomes such as impulsive eating, involvement toward food choices, and anticipated regret from making poor food choices, beyond alternatives.

INTRODUCTION

Recent work by MacInnis and colleagues (MacInnis and de Mello 2005; de Mello, MacInnis and Stewart 2007) has established the importance of hope in consumer research. Despite these contributions, an appropriate hope scale has yet to be developed and psychometrically assessed that can effectively distinguish hopeful from less hopeful consumers, and the important marketing outcomes that might result. Furthermore, researchers continue to pose questions for future research, such as, what is the role of hope in exchange relationships and how do consumers use hope to make decisions (de Mello, MacInnis and Stewart 2007). These questions have remained largely unanswered. Without the ability to recognize the hope of customers, and in turn, understand the ramifications of hopeful versus hopeless consumers, there remains a significant aspect of consumer behavior that is not only neglected and not well understood, but one that could provide meaningful prediction of important consumer outcomes.

In this research, we develop and validate two measures that assess related yet distinct aspects of consumer hope – dispositional and situational – that will allow researchers to extend our knowledge of consumer hope and further realize the important role hope plays in consumers achieving various outcomes such as purchase decisions, satisfaction, and subjective knowledge. With this knowledge of consumer hope, we may be better able to distinguish consumers who make the highest (and lowest) quality consumer decisions. In the next sections, we provide an overview of consumer hope, discuss dispositional and situational influences of hope, provide a three-dimension structure underlying consumer hope, and offer a rationale for how the consumer domain and the context of healthy eating provides specificity by which dispositional and situational hope measurement is needed.

CONCEPTUALIZATION

MacInnis and de Mello (2005) define hope as a positively valenced emotion evoked in response to an uncertain but possible goal-congruent outcome. Further, de Mello and MacInnis (2005) provide a three faceted conceptualization of the hope construct including “to hope”, “to have hope”, and “to be hopeful”. The “to hope” facet is defined as “a positive emotion that varies as a function of the degree of yearning for a possible, goal-congruent, future outcome”. The second facet, “to have hope”, is viewed as “a positive emotion that arises when a goal-congruent future outcome is judged to be possible” while the final facet, “to be hopeful”, is “a positive emotion that arises as a function of expectations regarding the likelihood of a possible future goal-congruent outcome”.

We propose an overarching view of consumer hope in which it is divided into two basic categories – dispositional consumer hope (DCH) and situational consumer hope (SCH). We have developed two measures of consumer hope that tap into each of these levels of analysis. Dispositional consumer hope is a long-term, stable predisposition in individuals to view consumption experiences as either hopeful or hopeless. Our DCH scale is designed to be specific enough to capture the entire domain of consumer behavior, but more specific than domain-general measures of hope that capture less specificity of consumer outcomes.

Situational consumer hope is a relatively short-term affective reaction to a specific environmental stimulus. As opposed to DCH, which is longer lasting but more diffuse, SCH tends to have a clear cause or object and is more focused and intense. Our SCH scale, therefore, is designed to more precisely measure outcomes related to specific contexts, but less effectively assesses broader consumer outcomes.

SCALE DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY

Taking into consideration the conceptualization of hope by MacInnis and de Mello (2005) and remaining consistent with the authors’ theorizing, we treat the “to have hope” and “to be hopeful” dimensions as necessary elements for hope to exist. However, we focus our scale development on the “to hope” dimension as this is the dimension we believe is most relevant for consumer research. While we create measures for the “to have hope” and “to be hopeful” dimensions of consumer hope in order to ensure that hope exists, we focus most of our validation efforts on the “to hope” dimension.

We develop items tapping both dispositional and situational aspects of consumer hope. First, we use methodological procedures to generate and purify our initial pool of items. Next, we use data from study 1 to select items based on a battery of psychometric criteria. Then, study 2 data are subjected to confirmatory factor analysis to provide evidence regarding the unidimensionality, scale reliability, and discriminant validity of the dispositional and situational consumer hope measures. Data from both studies 1 and 2 are then analyzed to provide further evidence of discriminant validity and initial assessments of the nomological validity of the scales. Study 3 is currently underway to evaluate the predictive validity of the newly developed consumer hope scales and study 4 is planned for the purpose of providing evidence for construct validation of our two measures in a food choice context.

MAJOR FINDINGS

In study 1, evidence is provided that both dispositional and situational consumer hope discriminate from optimism, a global measure of state-based hope, a global measure of trait-based hope, and a global measure of hopelessness. In study 2, we first provide validation for the unidimensional structure of the consumer hope scales. We then show that the dispositional consumer hope measure predicts subjective knowledge and customer satisfaction better than an existing global hope scale and optimism and that the DCH scale is distinct from both the Herth Hope Scale (Herth 1991) and the Life Orientation Test (Scheier et al. 1994). Moreover, we show that the SCH measure using a healthy food context predicts involvement with food choices, anticipated regret from making bad food choices, and impulsive eating better than an existing global state-based measure and that the SCH scale is distinct from the Herth Hope Index (Herth 1992). The results of two additional studies are forthcoming. In study 3, the DCH and SCH measures will be assessed for predictive validity while in study 4; we aim to demonstrate the predictive ability of both scales in a consumer food choice context.

REFERENCES

de Mello, Gustavo E. and Deborah J. MacInnis (2005), “Why and How Consumers Hope: Motivated Reasoning and the Marketplace” in Inside Consumption: Consumer Motives, Goals, and Desires, ed. S. Ratneshwar and David Glen Mick, New York: Routledge, 44-66.

de Mello, Gustavo E., Deborah J. MacInnis, and David W. Stewart (2007), “Threats to Hope and Motivated Reasoning of Product Information,” Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (August), 153-161.

Herth, Kaye (1991), “Development and Refinement of an Instrument to Measure Hope,”

Journal of Scholarly Inquiry in Nursing, 5 (1), 39-51.

Herth, Kaye (1992), “An Abbreviated Instrument to Measure Hope: Development and

Psychometric Evaluation,” Journal of Advanced Nursing, 17, 1251-1259.

MacInnis, Deborah J. and Gustavo E. de Mello (2005), “The Concept of Hope and Its

Relevance to Product Evaluation and Choice,” Journal of Marketing, 69 (January), 1-14.

Scheier, Michael F., Charles S. Carver, and Michael W. Bridges (1994), “Distinguishing

Optimism from Neuroticism (and Trait Anxiety, Self-Mastery, and Self-Esteem):

A Reevaluation of the Life Orientation Test,” Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 67 (6), 1063-1078.

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