Construct Measurement and Validation Procedures in MIS and Behavioral Research: Integrating New and Existing Techniques1

Despite the fact that validating the measures of constructs is critical to building cumulative knowledge in MIS and the behavioral sciences, the process of scale development and validation continues to be a challenging activity. Undoubtedly, part of the problem is that many of the scale development procedures advocated in the literature are limited by the fact that they (1) fail to adequately discuss how to develop appropriate conceptual definitions of the focal construct, (2) often fail to properly specify the measurement model that relates the latent construct to its indicators, and (3) underutilize techniques that provide evidence that the set of items used to represent the focal construct actually measures…