JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Assessing the applicability of frameworks developed in one country to other countries is an important step in establishing the generalizability of consumer behavior theories. In order for such comparisons to be meaningful, however, the instruments used to measure the theoretical constructs of interest have to exhibit adequate cross-national equivalence. We review the various forms of measurement invariance that have been proposed in the literature, organize them into a coherent conceptual framework that ties different requirements of measure equivalence to the goals of the research, and propose a practical, sequential testing procedure for assessing measurement invariance in cross-national consumer research. The approach is based on multisample confirmatory factor analysis and clarifies under what conditions meaningful comparisons of construct conceptualizations, construct means, and relationships between constructs are possible. An empirical application dealing with the single-factor construct of consumer ethnocentrism in Belgium, Great Britain, and Greece is provided to illustrate the procedure. The University of Chicago PressA might be due to true differences between countries on the underlying construct or due to systematic biases in the fuller understanding of consumer behavior and further advancement of consumer research as an academic discipline requires that the validity of models of way people from different countries respond to certain items. Similarly, cross-national differences in relationconsumer behavior developed in one country (mostly the United States) be examined in other countries as well ships between scale scores could indicate real differences in structural relations between constructs or scaling arti- (Bagozzi 1994; Dholakia, Firat, and Bagozzi 1980). A key concern in extending theories and their associated facts, differences in scale reliability, or even nonequivalence of the constructs involved. Findings of no differconstructs to other countries is whether the instruments designed to measure the relevant constructs are crossences between countries are open to analogous alternative interpretations. As succinctly stated by Horn (1991, p. nationally invariant (Hui and Triandis 1985). Measurement invariance refers to ''whether or not, under different 119): ''Without evidence of measurement invariance, the conditions of observing and studying phenomena, meaconclusions of a study must be weak.'' surement operations yield measures of the same attribute'' Although a variety of techniques have been used to (Horn and McArdle 1992, p. 117). If evidence supporting assess various aspects of measurement equivalence (cf. a measure's invariance is lacking, conclusions ba...

Response styles are a source of contamination in questionnaire ratings, and therefore they threaten the validity of conclusions drawn from marketing research data. In this article, the authors examine five forms of stylistic responding (acquiescence and disacquiescence response styles, extreme response style/response range, midpoint responding, and noncontingent responding) and discuss their biasing effects on scale scores and correlations between scales. Using data from large, representative samples of consumers from 11 countries of the European Union, the authors find systematic effects of response styles on scale scores as a function of two scale characteristics (the proportion of reverse-scored items and the extent of deviation of the scale mean from the midpoint of the response scale) and show that correlations between scales can be biased upward or downward depending on the correlation between the response style components. In combination with the apparent lack of concern with response styles evidenced in a secondary analysis of commonly used marketing scales, these findings suggest that marketing researchers should pay greater attention to the phenomenon of stylistic responding when constructing and using measurement instruments.

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