Revised and Optimised Personal Involvement Inventories

What it measures

McQuarrie and Munson (1986) challenged the strictly unidimensional structure of Zaichkowsky's (1985) PII, demonstrating via PCA that involvement contains both rational/cognitive facets (relevance, importance, utility) and emotional/affective facets (excitement, pleasure, appeal). The RPII re-specifies the PII as two 10-item factors. The Optimised PII (OPII) is a six-item short form selecting the three highest-loading items from each factor, suitable for time-constrained research. The Emotional subscale is most sensitive to hedonic product categories; the Rational subscale is more sensitive to high-risk utilitarian categories. The OPII is widely used as a covariate in advertising experiments.

Response format

7-point semantic differential; 20 bipolar pairs constituting the full RPII (10 Rational + 10 Emotional); 6-item OPII short form (3 Rational + 3 Emotional subset); items summed within subscale

Scale items

Rational/Cognitive Involvement — RPII-R (10 items): utilitarian, functional, and importance-based involvement. 7-point semantic differential (high-involvement pole = 7).

• Important / Unimportant
• Of concern to me / Of no concern
• Relevant / Irrelevant
• Means a lot to me / Means nothing to me
• Useful / Useless
• Valuable / Worthless
• Fundamental / Trivial
• Beneficial / Not beneficial
• Matters to me / Doesn't matter
• Significant / Insignificant

Emotional/Affective Involvement — RPII-E (10 items): hedonic, experiential, and affective involvement. 7-point semantic differential (high-involvement pole = 7). Items marked * are included in the 6-item OPII.

• Interesting / Boring *
• Exciting / Unexciting *
• Appealing / Unappealing *
• Fascinating / Mundane
• Desirable / Undesirable
• Wanted / Unwanted
• Needed / Not needed
• Essential / Nonessential
• Vital / Superfluous
• Important (affect) / Unimportant (affect)

OPII short form (6 items): 3 highest-loading Rational items + 3 highest-loading Emotional items from the RPII. Use as a rapid two-subscale involvement measure. 7-point semantic differential.

• OPII-R1. Important / Unimportant
• OPII-R2. Relevant / Irrelevant
• OPII-R3. Means a lot to me / Means nothing to me
• OPII-E1. Interesting / Boring
• OPII-E2. Exciting / Unexciting
• OPII-E3. Appealing / Unappealing

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

Usage notes & scoring

Use full RPII (20 items, two factors) when theoretical decomposition of cognitive vs. affective involvement is required. Use OPII (6 items) when brevity is paramount. The OPII has been the more commonly cited instrument in subsequent consumer research. Items declared = 26 (10 RPII-R + 10 RPII-E + 6 OPII items listed separately for clarity; note OPII items are a subset of the 20 RPII items).

Recommended companion scales

Citation

McQuarrie, E.F., & Munson, J.M. (1986). The Zaichkowsky personal involvement inventory: Modification and extension. Advances in Consumer Research, 14, 36–40.

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