Research Tips

Reporting versus Revealing Importance

Attribute importance ratings provided (reported) by respondents frequently do not correspond well with respondents’ actual behaviour such as their product choices (which reveal how important attributes actually are — at least in terms of purchase decisions).

The lack of correspondence may be due to the fact that people normally make choices by comparing whole products and all their associated attributes simultaneously, not by evaluating attributes individually. Social desirability bias may also cause people to over- or under-state the true importance of particular attributes (e.g., they may rate health and safety attributes as being more important than they really are to them and image related attributes as being less important).

Either way, using statistical procedures to derive importance indirectly, either through transaction records or conjoint analysis, may produce information about the relative importance of attributes that more closely corresponds to actual behaviour.