It is important to behave ethically when conducting a survey, like other social research. Mason and Suri (2012) stated, “It is the researcher’s responsibility to ensure that appropriate steps are taken to conduct ethical research”. There are two main ethical issues regarding conducting a survey. First, Willis (2005) noted the invasion of privacy as a major ethical issue in survey research. It is a right for respondents to have privacy. It is their right about when or to whom they reveal their information. The second issue is about voluntary participation by respondents. Respondents can leave the questionnaire at any time and refuse to participate in it. Therefore, the participants have given their ‘informed consent’ before answering the questions. Furthermore, there are two issues related to the AMT: debriefing and confidentially.
It is necessary to ensure that the workers understand the research’s purpose at the end of survey and the researcher’s contact details are provided in the event of questions. Therefore, a debriefing statement was provided at the beginning and end of the survey with the researcher’s details so that the workers can ask any questions or if they want to make a complaint. Regarding confidentiality, the worker IDs contain anonymised strings and personally identifiable information is not included. The other important issue is about the data stored by the AMT. However, as the current research used an outside service for construction of the survey, the collected data is therefore not stored in the AMT.
In order to conduct the current research, an ethics application was sent to the University of Salford Ethics Committee (Attached as appendix). There was no objection on ethical grounds to the current research by the ethics panel at the university. Therefore, the current research was conducted in accordance with the ethical approval provided by the university.
5.9 Summary
The methodology chapter has included considerations regarding the research design. The considerations with respect to the philosophical paradigm and the research method were explained. Then the research design of the current research was presented. The two-stage research design including three phases was employed in order to develop the scale. The first phase involved the item generation, which is explained in the next chapter. The second phase included one study with the objective of purifying the generated items in the first phase. In addition, the purpose of the first study was to provide initial evidence of the scale validity and reliability. The third phase included the second study with a new independent sample. The aim of the second study was to re-examine the validity (convergent and discriminant) of the construct and provide initial nomological validity. Moreover, the second study was designed to test the proposed model of customer engagement in the online brand community including potential antecedents and consequences. Sampling process, questionnaire design and quantitative analysis procedures were presented in detail for both studies.
The other important part of this chapter has been dedicated to the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The online survey was conducted on the AMT and the advantages and disadvantages of using this tool have been presented. This chapter ended with a section on the ethical consideration regarding conducting an online survey. The next chapter presents the first and second phases of the scale development process.
Chapter Six
Item Generation and Scale Development
6.1 Introduction
The previous chapter has presented the adopted methodology of the current research. Regarding the objective of the current research, to develop a reliable and valid customer engagement scale, a two-stage research design including three phases was suggested. In addition, Chapter Four discussed the development of a customer engagement concept in the marketing literature. Then, the proposed customer engagement construct, which is adopted from the theoretical study by Brodie et al. (2013), was discussed and it was suggested that customer engagement is a multi-dimensional construct. The five dimensions: socialising, learning, discussion, co-developing and advocating, were explained and the similar dimensions in a newly published study by Baldus et al. (2015) including learning, discussion and co- developing were discussed. This was followed by a discussion on the comparison between the current study and the study by Baldus et al. (2015), which is both unique and the latest study regarding customer engagement in the online brand community. As mentioned, the three dimensions that are also explored in the study, brand influence, seeking assistance and helping, were adopted and two more dimensions, advocating and discussion, are added, making five proposed dimensions to the customer engagement concept. This chapter presents the first and second phases of the scale development processes. Then the result of the sequential scale development processes is presented in separate sections. Particularly, this chapter addresses the third research objective: “To develop a reliable and valid measurement scale of the customer engagement construct.”
The first phase includes the different techniques regarding assessment of content validity of items generated. In this phase, an item pool generated by the researcher’s group is presented and the expert item judging is discussed. The second phase explains the study conducted to collect data for scale development. The analyses employed in the first study are then discussed. This section presents the exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis utilised in this study. Finally, this chapter ends with a refined 18-item, five-factor customer engagement construct for further assessment of dimensionality, reliability and validity in the next chapter.