Purpose

Our aim is to assist those researchers who are looking for precise and reliable measures for studying the thoughts and feelings of a group of people.  The primary feature of the site is the scales library, the world's largest database of consumer insight measures.  But, these are not just any run-of-the-mill survey questions; they are the best metrics available since they come from research that has been vetted and then published in the top scholarly journals in the field of consumer science.  Because the results of studies using these measures have been published, it is possible to judge the quality of the measures and report it in the reviews that compose the books and database available here.  Our hope is that researchers will find it easier than in the past to build on the work of the experts and adopt their reliable measures rather than spending time themselves developing scales from scratch, or worse, using simplistic survey questions of dubious quality.

The ever-growing repository here has over 4,900 scale reviews.  The measures are the type in which a score is calculated from responses to multiple items (e.g., survey questions).  This type of scale is much more precise than a 1-item measure when studying psychological constructs such as attitudes, motives, intentions, emotions, values, lifestyles, and personality traits. The extra precision of these scales increases the accuracy of measurement and, thereby, should improve the quality of decisions based upon their results. 

Although the primary focus of the studies that are reviewed here is the “consumer,” that should be interpreted very broadly.  Hundreds of scales in the database are amenable for use when studying segments of people such as viewers, patients, students, clients, voters, and group members. Further, many of these measures are useful when studying people in organizational contexts such as managers, sales people, staff, as well as other employees and professionals. 

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