Attitude Toward Shopping Websites (Community) Scale (ATSW-C)

Abstract

The Attitude Toward Shopping Websites (Community) Scale (ATSW-C), also conceptually designated in psychometric and marketing literature as the Connectedness Scale, is a three-item unidimensional self-report measurement instrument formulated to evaluate the subjective value, preference, and psychological importance that consumers assign to social and community-oriented functionalities within electronic retail (e-retail) environments. Introduced by Susan Rose, Moira Clark, Phillip Samouel, and Neil Hair (2012) within their seminal structural framework of the Online Customer Experience (OCE), the scale specifically measures a shopper’s desire to interact with like-minded peers, exchange authentic product experiences, and utilize consumer-generated product recommendations during online browsing and transactional journeys. Administered using a standard 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree), the instrument isolates the interpersonal, social dimension of online shopping environments from purely functional usability, information architecture, navigation efficiency, or automated algorithmic personalization. Psychometric assessment conducted on consumer samples across North America and Europe demonstrated excellent internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s α ≥ .85; Composite Reliability > .80), robust convergent validity with average variance extracted exceeding empirical thresholds, and unequivocal discriminant validity when modeled alongside cognitive and affective customer experience constructs. The ATSW-C provides digital marketing strategists, human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers, and consumer psychologists with a parsimonious, statistically sound diagnostic tool for assessing virtual community orientation and peer-to-peer social dynamics in contemporary electronic commerce.

Keywords

Attitude Toward Shopping Websites, ATSW-C, Online Customer Experience, Connectedness, E-retail Community, Social Commerce, Electronic Word-of-Mouth, Virtual Brand Communities, Consumer Psychology, Psychometrics

Authors

The scale was developed and empirically validated by an international research team specializing in customer relationship management, digital marketing, and psychometric structural equation modeling:

• Susan Rose — Professor of Marketing, Henley Business School, University of Reading, Greenlands, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.
• Moira Clark — Professor of Customer Experience and Director of The Henley Centre for Customer Management, Henley Business School, University of Reading, United Kingdom.
• Phillip Samouel — Professor of Business Economics and Quantitative Methods, Kingston Business School, Kingston University, Kingston Hill, Surrey, United Kingdom.
• Neil Hair — Associate Professor of Marketing and Executive Director of the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, E. Philip Saunders College of Business, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Rochester, New York, United States.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitude Toward Shopping Websites (Community) Scale (ATSW-C) is to isolate and quantify the psychological construct of connectedness—defined as the extent to which an individual consumer values interpersonal interaction, collective knowledge pooling, and virtual communal exchange within a commercial shopping website. During the maturation of business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, conventional human-computer interaction and marketing paradigms predominantly conceptualized websites through an instrumental or utilitarian lens, focusing on ease of use, task completion speed, site security, and catalog searchability. While functional attributes remain foundational, the emergence of social commerce necessitated psychometric tools capable of capturing the experiential, relational, and social antecedents of digital consumer behaviors.

Rose et al. (2012) designed the ATSW-C to address an essential theoretical gap: determining how consumer evaluations of a website’s social architecture influence their cognitive states (such as flow, perceived control, and cognitive engagement) and affective states (including positive affect, emotional bonding, and aesthetic pleasure). The operationalization of this measure allows researchers to determine whether online shoppers approach an interface as an isolated utilitarian tool or as a vibrant, interactive virtual community. In both basic and applied marketing research, the instrument answers pivotal questions regarding who values peer-generated discourse over proprietary brand messaging and how community affordances mitigate perceived risk in digital purchasing environments.

From an applied industry perspective, the ATSW-C serves user experience (UX) researchers, retail analysts, and digital platform architects who need to benchmark customer attitudes before and after launching social features, such as consumer review boards, synchronous community chat, social curation, and peer-to-peer discussion threads. Furthermore, in clinical and behavioral research examining digital socialization, compulsive online buying, or digital isolation, the scale offers an effective screening metric for investigating how individuals substitute physical social interactions with virtual consumer tribes.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the ATSW-C is Perceived Website Connectedness or Community Orientation in E-Retailing. This unidimensional construct reflects a consumer’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to affiliate with other shoppers via a technological platform. In the context of online consumer behavior, community orientation represents a convergence of three distinct social-behavioral facets:

1. Interactive Desire with Like-Minded Shoppers

The first facet taps the social belonging and homophily needs of the user. Online consumers often seek out peers who share their consumption tastes, aesthetic standards, lifestyle identities, or technical expertise. Interacting with like-minded shoppers provides social proof, validation of purchasing intentions, and an emotional sense of kinship. This dimension reflects an active social orientation rather than passive information intake, measuring the psychological drive to engage with real peers rather than artificial system prompts.

2. Altruistic and Reciprocal Experience Sharing

The second facet embodies electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and reciprocal exchange. Highly connected consumers are not solely passive consumers of data; they demonstrate a willingness and desire to contribute their own experiential knowledge, product evaluations, and post-purchase insights back into the collective ecosystem. This behavior is rooted in generalized reciprocity and consumer citizenship behavior, wherein individuals derive self-efficacy and psychological satisfaction from helping future shoppers make informed decisions.

3. Perceived Utility and Trust in Peer Recommendations

The third facet measures epistemic trust in decentralized, consumer-driven product evaluations. Consumers who score high on connectedness perceive peer evaluations as more credible, unbiased, and authentic than institutional marketing claims or algorithmic product rankings. This reflects an informational reliance on the collective intelligence of the user base, wherein crowd-sourced feedback significantly guides cognitive appraisal and reduces purchase ambiguity.

Together, these facets form an integrated construct distinct from general web usability, visual aesthetics, or mechanical interactivity. It measures an inherently human-to-human connection mediated through a commercial website interface.

Theoretical Framework

The Attitude Toward Shopping Websites (Community) Scale is grounded in a synthesis of psychological and sociological theories, predominantly Social Exchange Theory, Social Identity Theory, and the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) paradigm of environmental psychology.

Social Exchange Theory and Reciprocity

Rooted in the work of George Homans (1958) and Peter Blau (1964), Social Exchange Theory posits that human interactions are transactional, transactional exchanges where individuals seek to maximize informational and psychological rewards while minimizing cognitive and temporal costs. Within virtual shopping environments, the ATSW-C operationalizes exchange dynamics: consumers contribute reviews and ratings in exchange for social validation, status, and the reciprocal benefit of accessing reliable recommendations deposited by other community participants.

Social Identity and Virtual Communities

Drawing on Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s Social Identity Theory, individuals categorize themselves into social groups to enhance self-concept. In e-retailing, this manifests as identifying with a “brand community” or a “consumption subculture” (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001). When an e-retailer integrates community features, it ceases to be an impersonal catalog and evolves into a shared digital space where shared group membership, shared rituals, and a sense of moral responsibility toward other members develop.

The Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) Model

Rose et al. (2012) adopted the classical S-O-R framework formulated by Mehrabian and Russell (1974). In this model:

• Stimulus (S): Website environmental cues, including community and connectedness features, customization mechanisms, ease of use, and visual appeal.
• Organism (O): The customer’s internal cognitive states (perceived control, concentration) and affective states (enjoyment, emotional connection).
• Response (R): Consequent relational outcomes, such as e-satisfaction, institutional trust, customer repurchase intentions, and brand advocacy.

Within this causal sequence, the ATSW-C measures the customer’s cognitive-evaluative perception of the “connectedness” stimulus, which functions as an antecedent fueling the psychological organism’s cognitive and affective absorption during the online shopping encounter.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the ATSW-C was evaluated by Rose et al. (2012) utilizing a cross-sectional web survey across diverse consumer cohorts in the United States and Europe ($N = 220$). Construct, convergent, and discriminant validities were confirmed through rigorous structural equation modeling (SEM) protocols.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was established in accordance with the classical benchmark criteria delineated by Fornell and Larcker (1981) and Bagozzi and Yi (1988). All three scale items loaded substantially and significantly on their hypothesized latent factor. Standardized factor loadings (λ) for the items ranged between .78 and .89 ($p < .001$), demonstrating that the latent variable accounts for the vast majority of variance in each individual indicator. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for the connectedness dimension comfortably surpassed the recommended .50 threshold, establishing that variance explained by the underlying construct is substantially larger than variance attributable to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

To demonstrate that connectedness represents a unique psychological entity rather than a redundant artifact of general website favorability, Rose et al. tested discriminant validity against seven other latent constructs within their comprehensive antecedent framework: Information Quality, Interactive Speed, Customization, Website Usability, Cognitive State, Affective State, and Customer Experience (OCE). In all paired comparisons:

• The square root of the AVE for the ATSW-C factor exceeded its bivariate correlations ($r$) with any other latent construct in the measurement model (Fornell-Larcker criterion).
• Chi-square difference tests comparing unconstrained structural models against constrained models (where factor inter-correlations were fixed to unity) showed statistically significant deterioration in fit ($p < .001$), verifying distinctness.

Nomological and Predictive Validity

Nomological validity was verified by incorporating the scale into a comprehensive structural equation model. Perceived website connectedness demonstrated statistically significant direct structural paths to shoppers’ affective states (β = .18, $p < .05$) and indirect paths to ultimate outcome variables including customer satisfaction and repurchase intention, confirming its hypothesized role within the broader nomological network of consumer digital psychology.

Reliability

The reliability of the ATSW-C has been consistently documented across psychometric assessments in e-commerce literature:

• Internal Consistency: In the initial validation study ($N = 220$), the scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of α = .85, indicating strong internal consistency that exceeds standard psychometric criteria for both exploratory (≥ .70) and established (≥ .80) instruments.
• Composite Reliability: The Composite Reliability (CR) index was calculated at .86, exceeding the recognized .70 benchmark (Bagozzi & Yi, 1988), which confirms that the composite score demonstrates high structural stability and low internal measurement noise.
• Standard Error of Measurement (SEM): Item-total correlations for each of the three indicators ranged from .68 to .76, confirming that no single item introduced undue error variance or disproportionately dominated the aggregate score.

Although test-retest reliability across extended temporal intervals was not reported in the cross-sectional 2012 study, subsequent longitudinal studies in digital marketing environments indicate that community attitudes remain stable in the absence of major interface redesigns or severe community disruptions.

Factor Analysis

Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic approaches have confirmed the unidimensional structure of the three-item instrument.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

A full measurement model was estimated using maximum likelihood estimation in structural equation modeling software. The three community items loaded onto a single first-order latent factor labeled Connectedness. Factor loadings and error variances were as follows:

• Item 1: Standardized loading λ = .82 (standard error ≈ .045, $t > 18.0$)
• Item 2: Standardized loading λ = .88 (standard error ≈ .041, $t > 21.0$)
• Item 3: Standardized loading λ = .78 (standard error ≈ .048, $t > 16.5$)

Model Fit Indices

When evaluated within the overall antecedent measurement model, the global goodness-of-fit indices demonstrated an exceptional fit to the empirical data:

• $\chi^2 / df$ ratio < 2.0, indicating satisfactory parsimony.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .96, surpassing the conventional .95 cutoff.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = .95, confirming superior baseline model improvement.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = .048 (90% Confidence Interval: [.036, .060]), remaining well beneath the .06 standard.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) = .042, below the .08 criterion.

Modification indices revealed no significant cross-loadings with usability or customization factors, establishing the structural parsimony of the scale.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Attitude Toward Shopping Websites (Community) Scale are organized as follows:

• Instrument Type: Standardized, self-report psychological questionnaire.
• Administration Modality: Online web surveys, computerized testing modules, or paper-and-pencil formats (predominantly administered digitally following a website interaction session).
• Target Population: Adult consumers (ages 18+) who browse or purchase products on business-to-consumer e-commerce websites.
• Completion Duration: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Number of Items: 3 authentic indicators.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat disagree, 4 = Neutral, 5 = Somewhat agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly agree).
• Scoring Protocol: All items are positively framed (no reverse-scored items). An aggregate score is derived by computing the arithmetic mean of all three items:

Overall Connectedness Score = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3) / 3

• Score Interpretation:
  • 1.00 – 2.99: Low community orientation / utilitarian detachment (shopper prefers solitary transactions and disregards peer communal features).
  • 3.00 – 4.99: Moderate / ambivalent community orientation (shopper utilizes community reviews pragmatically but lacks active engagement).
  • 5.00 – 7.00: High community orientation / strong connectedness (shopper actively seeks social exchange, peer engagement, and community affiliation).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The scale was developed and published in 2012 in the Journal of Retailing by authors Susan Rose, Moira Clark, Phillip Samouel, and Neil Hair. The article is copyrighted by New York University and published by Elsevier Inc.

Under academic fair-use guidelines, the scale items may be utilized without financial charge for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, thesis dissertations, and scientific investigations, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is cited. Commercial applications, widespread redistribution, or inclusion in proprietary software packages may require formal copyright clearance and licensing permissions obtained through Elsevier’s RightsLink service or directly through the corresponding authors.

References

• Bagozzi, R. P., & Yi, Y. (1988). On the evaluation of structural equation models. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 16(1), 74–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02723327
• Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. John Wiley & Sons.
• 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
• Homans, G. C. (1958). Social behavior as exchange. American Journal of Sociology, 63(6), 597–606. https://doi.org/10.1086/222355
• Mehrabian, A., & Russell, J. A. (1974). An approach to environmental psychology. MIT Press.
• Muniz, A. M., & O’Guinn, T. C. (2001). Brand community. Journal of Consumer Research, 27(4), 412–432. https://doi.org/10.1086/319618
• Rose, S., Clark, M., Samouel, P., & Hair, N. (2012). Online customer experience in e-retailing: An empirical model of antecedents and outcomes. Journal of Retailing, 88(2), 308–322. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2012.03.001
• Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

Items of the Scale