Assessing the validity of secondary data proxies for marketing constructs

This paper outlines alternative methods for assessing the validity of secondary data proxies for marketing constructs. By employing secondary data proxies, researchers can avail themselves to new sources of data and can shed new light on or provide important corroborating evidence to established streams of research that have relied on a limited variety of methodological approaches. Still, secondary data proxies are not heavily used for marketing constructs, appearing especially infrequently as independent variables in the extant literature. A key issue that reduces their attractiveness appears to relate to construct validity [Rindfleisch and Heide, 1997]. Unlike multi-item scales, procedures for investigating the construct validity of a secondary data proxy are not well-defined or generally accepted. This paper argues that judicious selection of an appropriate proxy and careful assessment of the proxy's performance within a theoretically specified nomological network of constructs can provide compelling evidence of construct validity. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.