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The purchase of apparel items is classified as a high involvement activity. A majority of the involvement research deals with product-specific measures of involvement. Recently, a general measure of involvement, the Personal Involvement Inventory (PII), was developed to be used across a wide variety of product categories (Zaichkowsky, 1985). One objective of this study was to use the PII to determine women's fashion apparel involvement across two fashion-oriented groups. In addition, the measure's convergent validity was investigated by comparing its performance with two product-specific involvement measures. The sample consisted of two groups, women's specialty store customers (n=220), aged 30-50, and female home economics students (n=103), aged 18-20. Data were collected through a questionnaire distributed to both groups. Both groups were more highly involved with apparel than the Zaichkowsky groups were with most other products, cars being the lone exception. Despite its more general form, the PII demonstrated convergent validity in that the intercorrelations between the three involvement measures were signiricant (p < .01). Results indicated that the PII is both a reliable and valid measure of the involvement construct.
Fairhurst et al. (1989) studied this question.