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is made. Peter and Ryan (1976) argued that perceived risk generally consists of
two components, one related to an uncertainty or probability of loss notion and the
other related to a consequence or the importance of the notion of loss. In this study,
perceived risk refers to the Internet users’
perception on the possibility of yielding
unexpected outcomes with undesirable consequences. Many prior studies (Dion et
al., 1995; Doney & Cannon, 1997; Morgan & Hunt, 1994) have discovered a
strong relation between risk and the concept of trust. As suggested by Selnes
(1998), perceived risk in a buyer-seller relationship is reduced by trust. Therefore,
the proposition is:
Proposition 10:
CTIS is negatively associated with perceived risk in Internet
shopping.
INSTRUMENT DEVELOPMENT
A systematic and rigorous approach of developing measurement instruments
is strongly advocated in the IS discipline. IS scholars (e.g. Bailey
& Pearson, 1983;
Ives et al., 1983; Doll & Torkzadeh, 1988; Davis, 1989) have claimed that
constructs with strong theoretical justification and measures with high degrees of
reliability and validity are prerequisites to cumulative knowledge in IS research.
Since this study is one of the first empirical studies of trust in Internet shopping, a
large part of the measurement instrument had to be developed from scratch, rather
than be borrowed from the literature. The process of instrument development in
this
study is mainly divided into three stages, they are: (1) item creation, (2) scale
development, and (3) instrument testing.
Stage 1: Item Creation
Churchill (1979) recommended a series of techniques in generating measure-
ment items, including literature searches, experience surveys, critical incident
analysis, focus groups, and in-depth interviews. The use of these methods can
enable the generation of measurement items with a relatively high degree of content
validity (Moore & Benbasat, 1991).
In this study, forty-one items were generated
using the following three methods and all these measurement items are listed in
Appendix 1.