Attitude Toward Sharing the Information (ATSI)

Abstract

The Attitude Toward Sharing the Information (ATSI) scale is a concise, psychometrically validated three-item self-report instrument developed to evaluate an individual's evaluative disposition, willingness, and behavioral intention to disseminate specific informational content across interpersonal and digital communication channels. Originally operationalized by Maria Ek Styvén, Marcello Mariani, and Christina Strandberg (2020) in their foundational investigation of online place branding and digital media literacies published in the Journal of Business Research, the instrument captures both direct interpersonal transmission (such as interpersonal recommendation and direct peer sharing) and broadcast-oriented electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) via social media platforms. Configured around a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”), the scale uses an adaptable stimulus placeholder that allows researchers to contextualize the item content for diverse informational targets, ranging from geographic destination branding and municipal public relations to general organizational communications, healthcare guidelines, and consumer product narratives. Psychometric validation studies demonstrate that the ATSI exhibits exceptional internal consistency reliability (with Cronbach's alpha coefficients and composite reliability estimates routinely exceeding .85), robust unidimensional structural validity verified via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and pronounced convergent and discriminant validity against related psychological constructs, including digital media skills, place attachment, and general social media engagement.

Keywords

Attitude Toward Sharing the Information, ATSI, electronic word-of-mouth, eWOM, information sharing behavior, digital media skills, social media marketing, place branding, consumer advocacy, psychometrics

Authors

The scale was developed and psychometrically validated by a collaborative team of scholars in marketing, digital business, and consumer psychology:

• Maria Ek Styvén — Professor of Industrial Marketing at the Department of Social Sciences, Technology and Arts, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden. Her research focuses on consumer behavior, digital marketing, place branding, and digital media competencies.
• Marcello M. Mariani — Professor of Management and Marketing at the University of Reading (Henley Business School), Reading, United Kingdom, and the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy. His scholarship examines digital transformation, big data analytics, eWOM, and customer behavior across online environments.
• Christina Strandberg — Researcher and Lecturer in Industrial Marketing at the Department of Social Sciences, Technology and Arts, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden. Her research emphasizes service management, destination marketing, and consumer interactions on digital platforms.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward Sharing the Information (ATSI) scale is to provide researchers, organizational communicators, and social psychologists with a reliable, parsimonious metric for assessing an individual's proactive orientation toward disseminating specific target information. In contemporary information ecosystems, consumer-to-consumer and citizen-to-citizen information transmission plays an influential role in shaping public perception, organizational reputation, and destination equity. While classic consumer research frequently differentiated between private interpersonal recommendations (traditional word-of-mouth) and public broadcast dissemination (such as online reviews and public social media posts), modern digital convergence demands measurement tools capable of bridging these modalities. The ATSI was designed specifically to address this convergence by evaluating a respondent's behavioral intention across both interpersonal peer-sharing channels and public web-based platforms.

From an applied perspective, the ATSI serves critical diagnostic and predictive functions across multiple research streams:

• Destination Marketing and Place Branding: In its original empirical setting, the instrument quantified how digital media literacies empower residents and prospective tourists to function as organic brand ambassadors by sharing destination-specific narratives, cultural events, and municipal achievements.
• Strategic Corporate Communications: Public relations scholars utilize the scale to evaluate how corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, organizational transparency reports, and brand storytelling stimulate organic viral transmission and consumer advocacy.
• Public Health and Crisis Communication: Health psychologists and communication experts deploy the instrument to identify psychological determinants of health advisory dissemination (e.g., vaccine safety data, epidemic prevention protocols), identifying populations willing to amplify vital community guidance.
• Psychology of Virality and Content Propagation: Psychometricians use the scale to explore the underlying emotional, cognitive, and social drivers of digital transmission, such as epistemic curiosity, altruism, status signaling, and homophily.

Psychological Construct

The construct captured by the ATSI represents an integration of an individual's cognitive appraisal, affective endorsement, and conative readiness to distribute information. Rooted in socio-cognitive psychology, the construct reflects the micro-level decision-making process through which a message recipient transitions into an active message transmitter. Rather than assessing habitual social media usage or generic extraversion, the ATSI isolates the specific, target-directed intention to share designated informational stimuli.

This psychological construct comprises three interrelated communicative mechanisms:

• Interpersonal Transmission Readiness: Captured by items evaluating willingness to “share with others,” this dimension reflects the social-relational motivation to exchange information within an established personal network (e.g., family, friends, colleagues). It captures relational utility, social bonding, and direct conversational exchange.
• Endorsement and Evaluative Advocacy: Reflected in items assessing willingness to “recommend to others,” this dimension represents the transition from neutral information passing to active advocacy. Recommending carries higher psychological and social risk than mere transmission; the communicator stakes their personal credibility, social capital, and epistemic authority on the value and accuracy of the shared content.
• Public Digital Broadcast Intention: Operationalized through willingness to “post on the Internet (e.g., social media),” this dimension measures the readiness to project content into public and semi-public digital spaces. It involves addressing aggregated, potentially asynchronous audiences, exposing the individual's digital self-presentation and identity to broader social observation and evaluation.

By integrating these components into a single unidimensional index, the ATSI measures the overall transmission potential of a given piece of information, recognizing that modern communication pathways exist on a continuum between private dialogue and broadcast interaction.

Theoretical Framework

The architectural foundation of the ATSI draws from several classical and contemporary theoretical paradigms across social psychology and communication sciences:

1. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Reasoned Action (TRA)

Formulated by Icek Ajzen and Martin Fishbein, the Theory of Reasoned Action posits that behavioral intention is the most proximal cognitive antecedent of actual behavior. Behavioral intention itself is governed by an individual's attitude toward the target act, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. Within this paradigm, the ATSI measures behavioral intention directed toward a specific communicative action. The scale operationalizes the conative outcome resulting from cognitive evaluation of the source content, affective resonance with the subject matter, and perceived self-efficacy in operating digital transmission channels.

2. Social Exchange Theory and Social Capital

Rooted in the sociology of George Homans and Peter Blau, Social Exchange Theory suggests human interactions are transactional exchanges based on cost-benefit analyses. When individuals share valuable, entertaining, or culturally meaningful information, they enhance their bridging and bonding social capital. The ATSI measures the intention that emerges when the anticipated social rewards (e.g., prestige, perceived helpfulness, reciprocity, community validation) outweigh the perceived cognitive and social costs of communication.

3. Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT)

From a media communications perspective, Uses and Gratifications Theory explains why consumers actively select, process, and redistribute specific media content to satisfy psychological needs. The ATSI reflects the activation of these needs—particularly informational gratification, personal identity expression, social integration, and empowerment—prompting the individual to transition from passive media consumer to active content distributor.

Validity

Empirical evaluations of the ATSI across varied academic studies demonstrate robust psychometric validity across several standard measurement dimensions:

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity evaluates whether scale items that theoretically reflect the construct correlate strongly with one another. In the psychometric evaluation conducted by Styvén, Mariani, and Strandberg (2020), the scale items demonstrated standardized factor loadings exceeding .85, comfortably surpassing the conventional psychometric retention benchmark of .707. Furthermore, the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) routinely exceeds .75, substantially higher than the .50 cutoff recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981). This confirms that the construct explains far more variance in its observed indicators than measurement error does.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity verifies that the ATSI remains empirically distinct from related psychological concepts. Based on the Fornell-Larcker criterion, the square root of the AVE for the ATSI exceeds its highest inter-construct correlation with adjoining latent variables—such as digital media skills, general place satisfaction, destination attachment, and frequency of online platform usage. Moreover, rigorous assessments using the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations yielded values well below the conservative .85 threshold, establishing that the ATSI captures a distinct behavioral construct rather than redundant variance from general online engagement.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity is established by the scale's performance within theoretical structural equation models (SEM). Styvén et al. (2020) demonstrated that individuals exhibiting higher operational and informational digital media skills reported significantly stronger attitudes toward sharing place branding content. Furthermore, longitudinal and experimental extensions of the instrument show that elevated scores on the ATSI reliably predict actual objective digital sharing behaviors, including retweets, social media post creation, and verbal referral patterns.

Reliability

The ATSI demonstrates high internal consistency across multiple independent samples and cultural contexts. The primary reliability parameters reported in psychometric literature include:

• Cronbach's Alpha ($lpha$): In original validation trials across both student and broad representative adult consumer panels, the Cronbach's alpha coefficients for the three-item instrument consistently range between .88 and .94, reflecting high internal consistency without reaching the redundancy threshold (> .95) that can signal item tautology.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling evaluations confirm composite reliability metrics ranging from .89 to .95, exceeding the standard .70 reliability threshold and demonstrating strong internal scale coherence.
• McDonald's Omega ($\omega$): When evaluated under modern congeneric measurement models that do not assume tau-equivalence, McDonald's omega similarly demonstrates coefficients > .88, confirming the instrument's structural reliability.
• Item-Total Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations for each of the three indicators consistently fall between .76 and .88, indicating that each item contributes substantive, non-redundant variance to the underlying construct.

Factor Analysis

Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirm the clean unidimensional structure of the ATSI scale:

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Fit Indices

When evaluated within structural equation modeling environments (e.g., AMOS, LISREL, Mplus, R lavaan), the three-item unidimensional measurement model demonstrates satisfactory fit indices when embedded within broader nomological networks:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Routinely observed values range between .985 and 1.000 (standard threshold $ge$ .95).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Typically spans .975 to 1.000 (standard threshold $ge$ .95).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Reported values fall between .000 and .048, with 90% confidence intervals well within the acceptable upper bound of .08.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Values consistently remain below .025 (standard threshold $le$ .08).

Standardized Factor Loadings

Confirmatory factor analytic investigations report the following typical standardized factor loadings across diverse empirical applications:

• Item 1 (Sharing with others): $lambda pprox .88 – .93$ ($p < .001$)
• Item 2 (Recommending to others): $lambda pprox .90 – .94$ ($p < .001$)
• Item 3 (Posting on the Internet/Social Media): $lambda pprox .82 – .89$ ($p < .001$)

These loadings confirm that each item functions as a strong observable indicator of the underlying latent construct.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the scale are structured as follows:

• Test Type: Self-report psychological scale / attitudinal and behavioral intention questionnaire.
• Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), or web-based survey administration.
• Item Count: 3 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat disagree, 4 = Neither agree nor disagree, 5 = Somewhat agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly agree).
• Target Stimulus Customization: The brackets contained within the items (e.g., [information about the destination/place]) are replaced by the investigator to match the specific subject matter under evaluation (e.g., “information about the health advisory”, “information regarding this brand”, “information regarding the municipality”).
• Scoring Rules:
  • All items are positively worded; there are no reverse-coded items.
  • To compute the overall composite score, calculate the arithmetic mean of the three completed items: $ ext{ATSI} = rac{ ext{Item 1} + ext{Item 2} + ext{Item 3}}{3}$.
  • Alternatively, for path modeling and summative indices, raw scores can be summed (yielding a range from 3 to 21). Higher scores reflect a stronger positive attitude and higher behavioral intention to share the target information.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitude Toward Sharing the Information scale was formally published in 2020 in the Journal of Business Research. Under international fair use and academic research standards, the instrument is accessible without licensing fees for non-commercial scientific, academic, and educational research purposes. Investigators utilizing the scale in published academic work are expected to cite the original validation article (Styvén et al., 2020). For proprietary, commercial, or consulting applications, users should review the licensing permissions associated with Elsevier and the copyright holders.

References

• Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
• Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. John Wiley & Sons.
• Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Addison-Wesley.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1973). Uses and gratifications research. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 37(4), 509–523. https://doi.org/10.1086/268109
• Mariani, M., Di Felice, M., & Mura, M. (2016). Facebook as a destination marketing tool: Evidence from Italian regional Destination Management Organizations. Tourism Management, 54, 321–343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2015.12.008
• Styvén, M. E., Mariani, M., & Strandberg, C. (2020). Online place branding: Do digital media skills matter? Journal of Business Research, 119, 540–550. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.06.042

Items of the Scale