How the Original Sampler was Constructed

The sampler was an extract from the Calgary Surveys Query System (CSQS) of the "better" instruments in the most recent 10 years of CSQS (1983-1992). Somewhat arbitrarily we selected 4 top journals (MIS Quarterly, Communications of the ACM, Management Science, and Information Systems Research), and further limited our selection to those articles where some significant effort had been made to determine both the instrument's reliability and validity (cf Zmud and Boynton, 1991). We also selected those that reported the initial development of an instrument rather than its further use. Our goal was to create a list which would be practical to post on the Web while at the same time be a significant and representative sample of current instruments in IS. The result was 43 articles. Each article examined had an average of 4 constructs, which contributed more than 180 constructs, each followed by one or more links to the citations themselves. For those articles in MIS Quarterly we have also provided a link to the archives for this journal so that more information can be found for these articles. The "ID #'s" which have been used (as link names in the underlying HTML code) are the same as used in CSQS so more information on each citation can also be found by using this software.

As is true of any indexing task we must caution the user that though we have endeavored to assess the constructs measured as carefully as possible there are bound to be other interpretations that could be applied. Please contact us via our e-mail addresses should you have any particular concerns in this regard. We also encourage you to refer to our publication:

Newsted, P. R., Munro, M., & Huff, S. Data Acquisition Instruments in Management Information Systems," In K. Kraemer (ed.), The Information Systems Research Challenge: Survey Research Methods, Boston: Harvard Business School, 1991, pp 187-209.

This article gives the full methodology used to create CSQS and determine the constructs.