Identifying Sources of Error in Informant Reports

Researchers often seek to understand how organizations make decisions. To obtain data about these organization-level issues, they traditionally have interviewed one or two key persons in the organizations. Information obtained in this manner, however, is subject to several sources of bias. In this article, an analytical technique is reviewed that allows the researcher to decompose these informant reports into their respective trait, informant bias, and measure-specificity components, using LISREL An illustration of the technique, based on a survey of police executives, is provided