As the name suggests, the Marketing Scales website provides assistance to those engaged in "marketing" research, particularly those who use measurement scales. The term "marketing" is used very broadly. The services provided here are useful to a very wide group of professionals who want to use scientific methods to study the thoughts and feelings of some group of people. The connection with marketing in particular comes from the measures themselves having been used and tested in research that was published in scholarly marketing-related journals (as explained further below). Because these measures have been used and the results published, it is possible for those with some understanding of psychometrics to judge the quality of the scales.
Not all business-related measures are reviewed here. The focus is on the type of survey questions and metrics used in experimental settings where a score is calculated from multiple items that have been answered by respondents. We call these scales. The ones reviewed in the database cover hundreds of the most common constructs of interest to those doing research of consumer-related issues, things such as attitudes, motives, intentions, emotions, values, lifestyles, shopping orientations, and personality traits. Although the reviews are original, the scales themselves come from a variety of sources. The primary journals that have been perused for scales are the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Advertising, and Journal of Retailing. Dozens of other journals have been consulted in writing the reviews.
At this time, the scales populating the database come from studies of “consumers.” The term “consumer” should be viewed broadly, meaning that hundreds of scales in the database are amenable for use when studying segments of people such as patients, students, clients, citizens, voters, and members. Further, many of these measures are also useful when studying people in organizational contexts such as managers, employees, and professionals.
Some of the reviews in the database are a revision and synthesis of material originally published in the first four volumes of the Marketing Scale Handbook series (1992, 1996, 2001, 2005), the ones published in paper form. Even though those books are no longer available, the reviews they contained can be purchased here. Volumes 5 (2009) and 6 (2012) are the only volumes available for purchase and are only in digital form. The reviews they contain are in the database and can be purchased a-la-cart if desired. New reviews, beyond those in Volume 6, are being added to the database now. The library is expected to grow by several hundred reviews every year, thereby increasing its value for researchers who want the benefit of using previously tested measures rather than building their own from scratch. Other books may be published in the future if there is sufficient interest in them.