Issue Importance

What it measures

This scale measures how much a person cares about a particular issue and wants to know more about it. Seiders, Flynn, and Nenkov (2022) used the scale, in the context of election-related policy issues, in a field study (with two issues) and once in an experiment, with participants recruited via Qualtrics. The authors described the scale as "adapted" from work by Chernov, Valenzuela, and McCombs (2011), but the items are quite different from that source's conceptually similar measures; it is more precise to describe this as a scale created by Seiders, Flynn, and Nenkov (2022) drawing ideas from the cited article.

Response format

7-point Likert

Scale items

• The issue of ___ matters in my life.
• I need to know what is going on related to this issue.
• ___ is an issue that I care about.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Alphas ranged from .82 to .96 across the studies (Seiders, Flynn, and Nenkov 2022, Web Appendices W2 and W10). A CFA on the field study data supported the scale's discriminant validity: squared correlations between this scale and several other scales in the study were less than the AVEs for each construct (Fornell and Larcker 1981). The authors referred to the scale as "need for orientation," but it is not given that name here because the items do not seem to fully cover that construct.

Citation

Seiders, Kathleen, Andrea Godfrey Flynn, and Gergana Y. Nenkov (2022), "How Industries Use Direct-to-Public Persuasion in Policy Conflicts: Asymmetries in Public Voting Responses," Journal of Marketing, 86 (2), 126-146.

Keywords