Psychographic Measure

A psychographic measure is a variable that represents a personal characteristic of an individual that is not [Page 635]a physical trait, as are demographic measures (age, gender, height, etc.). Rather, psychographic variables include personality traits, lifestyle preferences or interests, values or beliefs, and attitudes or opinions.

Because psychographics are not directly observable, as are many demographics, nor do they have a “factual” basis as do demographics, their measurement is less precise. Surveys are routinely used to measure psychographics, and they can serve as powerful independent variables in helping explain many dependent variables of interest. For example, in political science, understanding why people vote for the presidential candidates they do is heavily explained by psychographics such as party affiliation, socioeconomic class, religion, veteran status, sexual orientation, and other values, beliefs, and attitudes.

Psychographic characteristics often are measured by scales formed from a set of Likert items in which a series of statements are made and the respondent indicates the extent to which she or her agrees or disagrees with each statement. Factor analysis and other scaling techniques can then be used to identify the most reliable set of items to make up a scale for a particular psychographic measure.

Including psychographic measures in a questionnaire often increases the richness of one's survey database because they often are powerful predictors of other variables of interest. Psychographics are used routinely by market researchers. There are myriad scales that measure various psychographics; many are in the public domain, while others are highly proprietary and are quite expensive to access. In the latter case, many companies have devised and validated proprietary psychographic scales that require a researcher to send her or his raw survey data to the company. Then, for a fee, the company “scores” the raw data, thereby creating the psychographic variables for each respondent the researcher has in her or his data set.