Informants in organizational marketing research: Why use multiple informants and how to aggregate responses

Gerrit H. Van Bruggen, Gary L. Lilien, Manish Kacker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

241 Scopus citations

Abstract

Organizational research frequently involves seeking judgmental response data from informants within organizations. This article discusses why using multiple informants improves the quality of response data and thereby the validity of research findings. The authors show that when there are multiple informants who disagree, responses aggregated with confidence- or competence-based weights outperform those with response data-based weights, which in turn provide significant gains in estimation accuracy over simply averaging informant reports. The proposed methods are effective, inexpensive, and easy to use in organizational marketing research.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)469-478
Number of pages10
JournalJournal of Marketing Research
Volume39
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2002

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Business and International Management
  • Economics and Econometrics
  • Marketing

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