Should we use single items? Better not

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Abstract

Bergvist (2016, this issue) and Rossiter (2016, unpublished) claim that the conclusions of Sarstedt, Diamantopoulos, Salzberger, and Baumgartner (2016) are unwarranted as the study's methodology is flawed. This paper begs to differ.

Section snippets

Thank you, but…

Keeping with Oscar Wilde's famous quote “there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”, we very much appreciate the comments on our paper “Selecting single items to measure doubly concrete constructs: A cautionary tale” (Sarstedt, Diamantopoulos, Salzberger, & Wilczynski, 2016) by Bergkvist (in press) and Rossiter (2016). Considering that some of the paper's results question their research findings on the appropriateness of single-item

Where have all the expert raters (and users) of C-OAR-SE gone?

Construct definition in C-OAR-SE ultimately depends on rational expert judgment; or as Bergkvist (in press) notes: “the role of expert judges should be to determine the nature of the construct (…)”. For example, to classify a construct as doubly concrete, expert raters (or a majority thereof) have to agree that the construct has a simple, clear object coupled with a single and single-meaning attribute (Bergkvist, L., 2016, Rossiter, J. R., 2002). If the expert raters agree on the doubly

To predict or not predict: And if not, how?

The notion that single items of doubly concrete constructs exhibit at least the same predictive validity as their multi-item counterparts is one of the cornerstones of Rossiter, J. R., 2002, Rossiter, J. R., 2011a, Rossiter, J. R., 2011b C-OAR-SE procedure and has been empirically tested by Bergkvist, L. and Rossiter, J. R., 2007, Bergkvist, L. and Rossiter, J. R., 2009. However, the relevance of the latter two studies for C-OAR-SE remains highly unclear. On the one hand, Bergkvist and Rossiter

Conclusion

We are thankful for Bergkvist's (in press) and Rossiter's (2016) comments but for reasons depicted above are hesitant to accept their criticisms. In fact, their rejoinder misses the central point of the debate. There are many appealing reasons to use single items (e.g., Fuchs & Diamantopoulos, 2009) but predictive validity is certainly not one of them. Regardless of whether a construct is a doubly concrete construct, a concrete construct, or even just a construct, single items lag behind

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    The authors would like to thank Florian Kolbe for his support with the analysis. Furthermore, the authors would like to thank Barry J. Babin and Mitch Griffin for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

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