Development of Formative Constructs and Measurements for Performance Evaluation of Information Systems

Traditionally in IS studies, the relationship between construct and its measurement items tends to be assumed to be reflective, meaning that the measurements are a reflection of the construct. In reality, however, the nature of the construct can be often formative, which means that its measurement items describe and define the construct rather than vice versa. The purpose of this study was to investigate theoretical and empirically-analysed differences between formative construct and reflective construct through comprehensive interdisciplinary literature review. And then on the basis of these differences, we intended to derive the rule of specifying whether the construct is formative or reflective and propose the methodology of testing the validity(content validity, construct validity, internal consistency and external construct) of formative construct and its measurements, differentiated from that in the case of reflective construct. Also, we suggested the concrete statistical testing methods such as VTT(Vanishing Tetrad Test), MIMIC(Multiple Indicators and Multiple Causes) test and multi-collinearity test. In order to examine the applicability of this methodology to developing the constructs for performance evaluation of IS(Information Systems), we tried to identify its attribute(formative or reflective) and test the validity for the construct arbitrarily chosen among them which had been derived in our previous IS performance evaluation study by using this methodology. The result of the examination was that the methodology proposed in this study was significantly valid and effective in the area of IS performance evaluation.

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