IDENTIFYING SOURCES OF ERROR IN INFORMANT REPORTS - A CONFIRMATORY MEASUREMENT MODEL APPROACH

Researchers often seek to understand how organizations make decisions. To obtain data about these organization-level issues, they traditiona lly have interviewed on or two key persons in the organizations. Infor mation obtained in this manner, however, is subject to several sources of bias. In this article, and analytical technique is reviewed that a llows the researcher to decompose these informant reports into their r espective trait, informant bias, and measure-specificity components, u sing LISREL. An illustration of the technique, based on a survey of po lice executives, is provided.