Advantageous

• Ease of application due to its brevity & simplicity.
• Promotes higher response rates as the questions can be easily & quickly answered.

Disadvantageous

• There is less information available when using imputation methods to deal with missing values.
• Single-item measures do not allow for adjustment of measurement error (as is the case with multiple items), and this generally decreases their reliability.

Guideline for Single-Item Use (Diamantopoulos et al., 2012)

Exercise

The use of single item measure. Download a data-set here and draw the following model.

Further Reading

Bergkvist, L. (2015). Appropriate use of single-item measures is here to stay. Marketing Letters, 26(3), 245-255. Click here.

Bergkvist, L., & Rossiter, J. R. (2007). The predictive validity of multiple-item versus single-item measures of the same constructs. Journal of marketing research, 44(2), 175-184. Click here.

Diamantopoulos, A., Sarstedt, M., Fuchs, C., Wilczynski, P., & Kaiser, S. (2012). Guidelines for choosing between multi-item and single-item scales for construct measurement: a predictive validity perspective. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 40(3), 434-449. Click here.