PLS-SEM with SmartPLS 4

Single Item Measures

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)

Single-item measures should be considered only in situations when...

Small sample sizes are present (i.e., N < 50),
Path coefficients (i.e., the coefficients linking constructs in the structural model) of 0.30 and lower are expected,
Items of the originating multi-item scale are highly homogeneous (i.e., Correlation coefficients > 0.80, Cronbach’s alpha > 0.90), and
Items of the originating multi-item scale are semantically redundant

Exercise 1

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

Exercise 2

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.

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