About AMA

Martijn G. de Jong, Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp, Jean-Paul Fox, and Hans Baumgartner

Executive Summary
Valid measurement is a cornerstone of marketing as a science. Although the measurement of marketing constructs has greatly improved in recent years, systematic error is often neglected. However, it is well known that responses to questionnaires are often influenced by content-irrelevant factors called “response styles.” A response style can be defined as a tendency to respond systematically to questionnaire items on some basis other than what the items were specifically designed to measure.

In this article, the authors focus on extreme response style (ERS), one of the most pervasive and frequently studied response styles in the social sciences. Extreme response style is the tendency of respondents to favor or avoid using the endpoints of a rating scale, relatively independently of specific item content. Although the literature on ERS is extensive, the phenomenon has received relatively little attention in marketing journals. This is surprising because ERS has biasing effects on both the mean level of responses and the correlation between marketing constructs. Furthermore, in cross-national marketing research, country-specific variations in ERS may be easily misinterpreted as substantive differences in the marketing constructs examined, which could have adverse effects on the decisions of international marketers. Thus, ERS is an important threat to the validity of both domestic and cross-national survey-based marketing research.

The current research contributes to the ERS literature in two ways. First, the authors propose a new, item response theory (IRT)–based method for measuring ERS. The method eliminates the need to include a dedicated ERS scale in a survey. Through simulations, the authors show that the new method improves on traditional procedures, and a detailed analysis of a large-scale data set indicates that the modifications are necessary to model the data adequately. The ERS score can subsequently be used to correct survey data for ERS bias.

Second, the model integrates the advanced IRT measurement model with a structural hierarchical model for studying the antecedents of ERS. The authors simultaneously estimate a person’s ERS score and individual- and group-level (country) drivers of ERS, thus providing insights into the determinants of this important response style across people and countries. Specifically, they study both sociodemographic and national-cultural determinants of ERS using a data set involving 12,500 consumers from 26 countries in four continents. They find that the sociodemographic variables studied have a minor influence on ERS but that culture exerts a strong and predictable effect on ERS. Extreme response style is positively related to national-cultural individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity.

Biography
Martijn G. de Jong is Assistant Professor of Marketing at RSMErasmus University Rotterdam. His main research interests lie in the areas of cross-national measurement, validity of survey research, and Bayesian inference. His work has been published in Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing Research.

Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp is C. Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Area Chair of Marketing in the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina. His research interests include global marketing; the effectiveness of marketing strategies such as branding, private labels, and new products; interorganizational relationships; and marketing research techniques. He is executive director of AiMark, a global center studying key marketing strategy issues that brings together academics around the world, two of the top four market research agencies, and brand manufacturers. He has consulted with numerous companies, including Procter & Gamble, Kraft, Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, Zurich Financial Services, KPMG, Sara Lee, and Johnson & Johnson. Before joining the University of North Carolina, Steenkamp taught at universities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain, South Africa, and the United States. An award-winning researcher, he has written or edited five books and more than 100 scholarly publications. He serves on the editorial boards of all the top marketing journals and is past editor of International Journal of Research in Marketing. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences awarded him the Muller lifetime prize for “exceptional achievements in the area of the behavioral and social sciences.” It was the first time the prize was awarded to a researcher in any area of business administration. He received his PhD and master’s and bachelor’s degrees, all summa cum laude, from Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Jean-Paul Fox is an assistant professor with the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences in the Department of Research Methodology, Measurement and Data Analysis at Twente University. His research activities are in the areas of Bayesian statistics. His main interest focuses on complex modeling in higher-dimensional problems. The areas of modeling research are related to theory and methods of multivariate analysis, stochastic simulation, and mixed-effects modeling, among others. He executes applications and data analyses in the field of educational and psychological research. His work has been published in Psychometrika, among other outlets.

Hans Baumgartner (PhD, Stanford University) is Professor of Marketing, Charles & Lillian Binder Faculty Fellow, and Director of PhD Programs in the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. His research interests are in the areas of consumer behavior and research methodology. He has published articles on these topics in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Journal of Economic Literature. He is a past associate editor of Journal of Consumer Research and currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal für Betriebswirtschaft, and Marketing: Journal of Research and Management.