On the Reliability of Psychographic Research: Encouraging Signs for Measurement Accuracy and Methodology in Consumer Research

One of the persisting problems that the consumer researcher frequently encounters in using psychographics is the reliability of its measures and analysis. Like any other consumer behaviour measures, psychographics should be reliable enough to measure that which it is intended to measure and nothing else. Unreliable psychographic measures and analysis decrease the researcher′s ability to detect relationships between variables and reduce the confidence in the meaning of obtained relationships. This study addresses the problem of reliability in psychographic research, and attempts to find out how much concern has been given by consumer researchers to this problem in developing and analysing psychographic measures. An up‐to‐date review of the state‐of‐the‐art on the reliability of psychographic research is presented and provides a host of information and literature sources on this subject area. The study indicates that there are encouraging signs for measurement accuracy and methodology in consumer research.