Abstract

Unlike reflective measurement scales, the steps for development of formative measurement scales tend to be highly subjective and involve mostly the judgment of the researcher. Formative scales have been criticized for this reason. This paper extends Christophersen and Konradt’s (2008) method of joint development of a formative and reflective scale to assess mutual validity of each scale. We utilize a second order method to reduce measurement error in the formative scale as suggested by Edwards (2011), and test the efficacy of Generalized Structured Component Analysis (GeSCA) for this purpose. For illustrative purposes, we utilize a sample of formative and reflective job satisfaction survey data both to test our joint formative/reflective scale development technique and to assess which formative aspects of job satisfaction align with commonly used reflective job satisfaction scales.