After our extensive qualitative interviews but before
developing the final questionnaire, we engaged in several
additional stages of data collection. First, we
worked with six of the younger girls interviewed during
the qualitative study to establish the comprehensibility,
readability, and relevance of our initial items for
girls under 15. This step was especially important for
the item development of the new SSI scale. Next we
conducted several pretests, first establishing readability
with 27 adolescent girls (using an athletic youth group
as respondents) and then pretesting the full survey
with 60 girls between the ages of 12 and 19. This
pretest sample was obtained by contacting several
youth church groups and attending their meetings, as
well as by recruiting teens outside a retail chain focusing
on adolescents in a local mall. To ensure variance in
the responses, approximately half of the sample evaluated
stores they had shopped at “several times before,”
46 Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice
while the other half evaluated stores they had shopped
at “only a few times before.”
We analyzed the pretest data for internal consistency
with coefficient alphas and exploratory factor analysis
(with principal axis factoring and oblique rotation) to
assess the reliability of each construct and its loadings
(Bearden, Netemeyer, and Teel 1989; Churchill 1979).
Items with low loadings or cross-loadings were deleted,
with the items maintained for the main study all producing
reliable scales. Further details are provided
below.