Excerpt from Measuring Influence in Organizational Purchase Decisions The basic type of reliability information reported in each of these studies was an assessment of the degree of consensus or agreement observed among reports of purchase involvement obtained from tw9_gr_mgrg participants within the same organization or firm. Investigations of convergence in judg ments of the same phenomenon made by different respondents are sometimes referred to as assessments of validity rather than reliability (e.g Kane and Lawler, l978). However, the latter term is used here in preference to the former label in order to emphasize the distinction made by Campbell and Fiske (l959, p. 83) when they defined reliability as the agreement between two efforts to measure the same trait through maximally similar methods and validity as the agreement between two attempts to measure the same trait through maximally different methods (emphasis added). As discussed below, consensus was assessed in a variety of ways in these studies, some formal and some informal, and thus we summarize each result as indicating either high or l'low consensus, in accordance with the judgment rendered by the original authors in reporting their findings. Looking across the eight stud ies noted in Table l, one finds a conflicting set of results, high and low levels of consensus have been found with almost equal frequencies in these investigations. Given these disparate conclusions, the studies were seru tinized for possible sources of unreliability that might account for the differences in outcomes. Materials offering valuable insights into this class of measurement problems are to be found in two traditions of organi zation research: the informant technique used by sociologists (seidler, l974) and the method of peer assessment employed by psychologists (kane and Lawler, l978). About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.