The Behavioral Score Approach to Dependent Variables

Theoretical explanation is most often confined to the independent or predictor variables in most consumer research. Consumer behavior itself is either not measured or measured as a single manifest variable, usually of the form, How/will you buy/use product––in a period of time? Dependent variables should be considered from a more theoretical point of view. To this end we develop an approach to dependent variables using behavior scores that span the theoretical domain of a behavior. We apply this approach to develop a specific measure of newspaper readership using data from a national sample of 37,000 consumers.