Measuring Affective Response to Consumption Using Rasch Modeling

Abstract

The historic conceptualization of satisfaction has been criticized in recent years as emotions and affect gamed an increasingly important position in marketing (Bagozzi, Gopinath and Nyer 1999; Erevelles 1998). This paper describes the development of a scale to measure Affective Response to Consumption (ARC) using Rasch Modeling. The concept is an extension to satisfaction that has arisen out of both assessment of literature in satisfaction and attempts to address problems in measuring satisfaction. Rasch Modeling (Rasch 1960/80) is introduced as a measurement technique that is particularly suited for ARC, where items need to differ significantly in the intensity of the concept they represent. The final scale consists of 13 items ranging from impressed to euphoric. The newly developed scale distinguishes respondents with highly positive experiences, where commonly used scales, such as the Delighted-Terrible scale (Andrews and Withey 1976), fail to discriminate.