Foote, Cone and Belding Involement subscale : FCBI
1. FOOTE, CONE, AND BELDING
INVOLVEMENT SUBSCALE: FCBI
BY : SACHIN S B
1DS20BA086
2. CONSTRUCT:
The FCBI conceptualization views involvement as implying personal importance (i.e., rele
vance), and consequent attention to an object or product (cf. Ratchford 1987; Vaughn 1986).
This view is similar to the S-O-R paradigm of Houston and Rothschild (1977) and Zaich
kowsky's (1985) concept of involvement as well.
3. DESCRIPTION:
The FCBI is a three-item semantic differential measure. Each item is scored on a 7-point scale,
and item scores are summed to form an overall score.
4. DEVELOPMENT:
Scale development procedures are described in Ratchford (1987) and generally adhere to
prescribed psychometric scaling procedures. Fifty items were originally developed. This pool
of items was reduced to 30. These 30 items were tested over five studies for internal consistency,
ability to discriminate between products, and respondent understanding. These five studies
resulted in the three-item FCBI (Ratchford 1987; Vaughn 1986).
5. SAMPLES:
Five samples were used in the derivation of the final FCBI (i.e., adult samples of 30, 50, 30,
249, and 50), and numerous products were examined (e.g., 75 products for the n = 249 sample).
In addition, the final scale was administered to a sample of 1,792 adults over 254 possible
products.
The first sample of 30 was used to trim the 30 items to 11 items. The decision was also made
to trim this 11-item measure to 3 items for the remaining studies. The third, fourth, and fifth
studies, as well as the major study (n = 1,792), assessed the validity of the final three-item FCBI.
6. VALIDITY:
Internal consistency estimates for the FCBI in Studies 3 through 5 and the major study were .81,
.74, .75, and .77, respectively. A measure of consistency for the product ratings across studies
was also taken and indicated a very high level of consistency (correlations ranged from .84 to
.96). Item-to-factor correlations are also reported by Vaughn (1986) and ranged from .90 to .97
for the three FCBI items on the overall FCBI measure.
Several assessments of validity were also taken. Correlations with ratings from Zaichkowsky's
(1985) mean scores, and mean scores reported by Laurent and Kapferer (1985), indicated high
correlations with the FCBI (.38 to .86), suggesting convergent validity (using the n = 1,792 data).
Numerous estimates of discriminant and criterion validity also show support for the FCBI (n =
1,792 data).
7. Scores:
Mean scores were reported based on a 100-point scoring system and are plotted for 60 products
(see Ratchford 1987, p. 31).
