Assessing the Reliability of Psychographic Analyses

Psychographic, or life-style, analysis has proved useful in a wide variety of applications. However users have voiced concern about the reliability of the analysis and the reality of the segmentations it produces. As life-style items tend to be specific to individual applications and often have little theoretical support, there is particular need for a method of evaluating the stability of results. This paper reviews marketing studies which have tested life-style reliability and stability, and presents a method of assessing reliability using the jackknife. This method is particularly useful as it can handle small sample sizes, is not dependent on the number of items in the scale or the type of factor model used, and can provide detailed assessments of factor reliability. An empirical application of the method is presented.