Latent class analysis for marketing scale development
Francesca Bassi
University of Padova
Introduction
Measurement scales are a crucial instrument in marketing research for measuring unobservable variables such as attitudes, opinions and beliefs. Examples of unobservable variables related to marketing are customer satisfaction, purchase involvement, brand loyalty, scepticism towards advertising, and many others (for a review, see Bearden & Netemeyer 1998).
In using, evaluating or developing multi-item scales, a number of guidelines and procedures are recommended, to ensure that the measure is psychometrically as sound as possible. These procedures have been defined in the psychometric literature since the late 1970s. Traditionally,...