Initial Validation of Measures for Interest in Marketing Education

Abstract

To improve the understanding of the drivers of interest, and its impact on other outcomes, researchers and educators need valid and informative measures capturing the different domains of interest. Answering the lack of interest measures in marketing education, we develop and psychometrically assess three instruments reflecting the theoretical notions of situational and individual interest: course interest, contents interest, and job interest. Drawing on a relatively large sample of Norwegian upper-secondary marketing classes (Nclasses = 22; Nstudents = 433), initial psychometric validation showed that each instrument has good unidimensionality, local item independence, measurement precision across the latent scales, and invariance across instructional approaches, gender, and parental education level. Furthermore, the interest instruments are related but distinct from each other and provide different information than measures of perceptions and achievement. We conclude this first steppingstone by showing the instruments’ information value and discussing future paths for strengthening the validity evidence.