Understanding and Employing Formative Constructs: Conceptualization, Operationalization, and Threats of Misspecification

While tourism researchers devote large efforts to justify and test the theoretical relationships between constructs, the links between items and their respective constructs receive very little deliberate attention. This is because the relationship between construct and item is, often incorrectly, assumed to be reflective, meaning that the measurement items reflect the construct. In contrast to reflective constructs, for formative constructs, measurement items form the construct. In Study 1, we show empirically that 43.7% of the employed measures in the leading tourism journals are misspecified, and thus incorrectly conceptualized and operationalized: Formative constructs are frequently being mistaken for reflective constructs. In Study 2, we empirically demonstrate the threats and consequences of misspecification. In response, this research addresses the neglect of formative constructs, fosters their understanding, and explains how to conceptualize, operationalize, and estimate formative constructs in future research.