Developing and Validating a Measure of Web Personalization Strategy

An important theoretical undertaking in personalization research is to identify the structure of the multidimensional construct of personalization and to operationalize them in measurable terms. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate measurement scales for personalization by identifying four distinctive personalization archetypes and hypothesizing their respective relationships with different cognitive and affective outcomes. This effort was successful in several respects. New scales for measuring personalization strategies were developed based on the definitions of personalization archetypes (architectural, instrumental, social and commercial), which were in turn derived from an extensive review of multidisciplinary studies. A lab experiment with 229 student subjects was conducted to explore the structure of the personalization construct and to validate the instrument using four Web site stimuli representing four types of personalization strategies. The new measures were found to have strong psychometric properties and exhibit significant linkages with respective cognitive and affective outcomes as theoretically postulated.