Measuring Supply Chain Integration — Using the Q-Sort Technique

Summary Supply chain integration is an important topic for researchers and practitioners. However, the major concerns constraining the full and complete use of this concept in supply chain management research has been that the construct takes on its own meaning depending on individual subjectivity and different points of view. There is a need for researchers to operationalize and measure what it means by “supply chain integration.” The basic research question is whether a meaningful measure of supply chain integration could be developed. The Q-sort techniques could be used to cluster stimuli from subjective judgments to form a description of an indescribable object. This paper describes how the Q-sort technique could be used in the scale development process, and applies it to the context of measuring supply chain integration. The results indicate that the Q-sort technique is a useful methodological approach in eliminating the validity and reliability problems particularly in the early scale development stages for defining the construct of supply chain integration.