A short form of Sweeney, Hausknecht and Soutar's cognitive dissonance scale

Cognitive dissonance is central to consumer decision making in some contexts, typically major purchases. This led Sweeney et al. (2000) to develop a scale that recognised the emotional and cognitive components of cognitive dissonance. The scale, however, is unbalanced as the emotional subscale has 15 items, compared to the three and four items used to measure the two cognitive subscales. Given that some items may be superfluous when the alpha coefficient is above 0.80 (Rossiter, 2002), as was the case for this scale in the original study, and also considering the need to minimise respondent fatigue (DeVellis, 2003), the present study investigated the possibility of reducing the emotional subscale, while maintaining the strong measurement properties of the original scale. Using some of the data from Sweeney, Hausknecht and Soutar (2000), a five-item emotional subscale was developed, resulting in a 12-item dissonance scale, which was short, reliable and valid.