Measures Of Compulsive Buying: Applications And Recommendations

After the first phase of research on U.S. samples, an increasing interest emerged in compulsive buying in other, mostly European, countries. These studies employ compulsive buying scales. Most of these scales have, however, been developed and validated on U.S. samples and have not yet been tested in Europe. We investigate the validity of two important scales in the Netherlands; the broadly applied Clinical Screener (CS) and the newly developed, promising Compulsive Buying Index (CBI). Our results indicate problems concerning convergent and discriminant validity for both scales. It can be easily resolved for the CBI, but not for the CS. Nomological validity is confirmed for both scales. These suggest better transferability of the CBI to the Netherlands and to Europe.