ScholarGate
Explore
LibraryBookshelfDeskPreflightAssistant
Your tools
Compare
Build your library

Save methods, organize collections, and carry them to your desk.

Create account
Library / BrowseSearch the library…⌘K
Sign in
The library

Explore science by method, field & evidence.

One catalogue of research methods — learn how each one works, when to use it, and what it can’t do.

Search methods, fields, techniques…
8,178 methods11 fields7 method families40 languages
Science atlasMap the structure of science before you use it.Fields · methods · evidence routesExplore the map
FieldHealth & Medicine716Psychology570Business & Finance410Engineering330Life Sciences263Education261Research Practice248
ScholarGate

A content-first reference library for research methods — what each one is, how it works, and where it comes from.

Open data (CC-BY)

Explore

  • Library
  • Search the library…
  • Browse by field
  • Fields
  • Journey
  • Compare
  • Which method?

Reference

  • Subjects
  • Atlas
  • Glossary
  • Methodology
  • Philosophy

Your tools

  • Bookshelf
  • Desk
  • Chat

Company

  • About
  • Pricing
  • Contact
  • Suggest a method

Entries are compiled from published sources for reference. Verifying the accuracy and suitability of any information for your own use remains your responsibility.

© 2026 ScholarGate · A research-method reference library
  • Privacy
  • Cookies
  • Terms
  • Delete account
Natural Sciences236
Social Sciences185
Environment & Sustainability160
Law30
MethodStatistics1,836AI & ML1,661Decision Sciences932Research Methods1,354Measurement1,745Causal & Evidence532Research Practice118
138 methods in Business & Finance · MeasurementClear
Methods at the intersection of your two filters.
SortPopularityA–ZZ–ANewest
organizational behavior

360-Degree Feedback

360-degree feedback, also called multisource feedback, gathers ratings of a focal person's work behavior from the full circle of people around them, self, supervisor, peers, and direct reports, and sometimes customers, rather than from a single boss. The aim is to give a more complete, less biased picture of performanc

3 sources1995
strategic management

Absorptive Capacity Scale

Absorptive Capacity (ACAP) refers to an organization's ability to acquire, assimilate, transform, and exploit external knowledge to enhance innovation and performance. Zahra and George (2002) reconceptualized absorptive capacity into four distinct but interrelated processes in their foundational Academy of Management R

3 sources2002
organizational behavior

Abusive Supervision Scale

The Abusive Supervision Scale measures subordinates' perceptions of the extent to which their supervisors engage in sustained displays of hostile verbal and nonverbal behaviors, excluding physical contact. Bennett Tepper introduced both the construct and the scale in his 2000 Academy of Management Journal study, framin

2 sources2000
accounting

Activity-Based Costing

Activity-Based Costing (ABC) is an advanced costing method developed by Robert Kaplan and Robin Cooper that allocates overhead and indirect costs to products or services based on their actual consumption of activities. Rather than using arbitrary allocation bases (e.g., machine hours or direct labor), ABC traces costs

2 sources1987
marketing research

Adaptive Conjoint Analysis

Adaptive Conjoint Analysis (ACA) is a hybrid, computer-administered conjoint method that builds each respondent's part-worth utilities by combining a self-explicated priors stage with a sequence of adaptively chosen paired-comparison trade-offs. Developed by Richard Johnson at Sawtooth Software in the mid-1980s, ACA wa

2 sources1987
marketing

Advertising Effectiveness Study

Advertising Effectiveness Studies are research methods designed to measure the impact of advertising campaigns on consumer awareness, attitudes, purchase intention, and sales. Developed through work in marketing science and media measurement, these studies employ experimental designs, multivariate analysis, and attribu

3 sources1990
marketing management

American Customer Satisfaction Index

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), developed by Fornell and colleagues in 1996, is a structural equation modeling-based approach to measuring and predicting customer satisfaction across industries and over time. ACSI assesses customer expectations, perceived value, perceived quality, complaints, and loyal

2 sources1996
organizational behavior

Assessment Center Method

The assessment center method evaluates people, most often candidates for managerial roles, by observing their behavior across multiple job-relevant simulations and pooling the judgments of several trained assessors. It is a method, not a place: a standardized procedure in which candidates work through exercises such as

2 sources1982
accounting

Attribute Sampling in Auditing

Attribute sampling is a statistical sampling method used primarily in testing the operating effectiveness of internal controls. Rather than measuring the dollar impact of errors (as in substantive sampling), attribute sampling answers a yes/no question: 'Does this control exist and is it operating as designed?' By dete

2 sources1972
accounting

Audit Risk Model

The Audit Risk Model is a foundational framework developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) that structures audit planning by decomposing overall audit risk into three components: inherent risk, control risk, and detection risk. This model guides auditors in allocating resources and des

2 sources1983
organizational behavior

Authentic Leadership Questionnaire

The Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) is the dominant instrument for measuring authentic leadership, a positive leadership construct developed in the mid-2000s by Bruce Avolio, William Gardner, Fred Luthans, and colleagues. Authentic leaders are defined as those who are deeply aware of their own values, transpar

2 sources2008
organizational behavior

Authentic Leadership Scale

The Authentic Leadership Scale (ALS) is a 16-item instrument measuring four dimensions of authentic leadership: self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing, and internalized moral perspective. Developed by Walumbwa, Avolio, and colleagues in 2008, the ALS assesses leadership grounded in self-knowledge

2 sources2008
strategic management

Balanced Scorecard Performance Measure

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a strategic management system that translates organizational strategy into a coherent set of performance measures across four perspectives: Financial, Customer, Internal Process, and Learning and Growth. Developed by Kaplan and Norton (1992) in Harvard Business Review, the BSC addresses

3 sources1992
organizational behavior

Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales

Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) are performance-appraisal instruments whose scale points are defined by concrete examples of job behavior rather than by vague adjectives like 'good' or 'excellent.' Patricia Cain Smith and L. M. Kendall introduced the method in 1963 with their technique of retranslation of ex

1 source1963
economics

Benefit Transfer Method

Benefit transfer is the practice of estimating the economic value of a nonmarket good — clean water, a recreation site, an endangered species, an avoided health risk — at a new 'policy site' by adapting value estimates from one or more existing 'study sites' where primary valuation research was already conducted. Becau

2 sources1992
marketing

Brand Equity Measurement

Brand Equity Measurement is a comprehensive framework developed by David Aaker in 1991 for quantifying and assessing the value that a brand name adds to a product or service. It provides organizations with methods to understand how consumers perceive their brand across multiple dimensions, enabling better strategic dec

3 sources1991
marketing management

Brand Equity Scale

The Brand Equity Scale (BES) measures customer-based brand equity through perceived quality, brand loyalty, brand associations, and brand awareness. Developed by Yoo, Donthu, and Lee (2000), building on Aaker's foundational brand equity framework (1991), the BES operationalizes brand equity as the differential effect o

2 sources1991
marketing research

Brand-Price Trade-Off

Brand-Price Trade-Off (BPTO) is a pricing-research technique that measures how consumers trade off brand preference against price by presenting competing brands at varying prices and asking, repeatedly, which one they would buy. In the classic procedure the respondent chooses a brand from a set shown at given prices, a

3 sources1975
organizational behavior

Career Adapt-Abilities Scale

The Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS) measures the psychosocial resources and competencies that enable individuals to navigate career challenges and transitions. Developed by Savickas and Porfeli in 2012, the 24-item scale quantifies four dimensions: concern (future orientation), control (agency), curiosity (explorat

3 sources2012
economics

Choice Experiment Valuation

A choice experiment (discrete choice experiment, DCE) is an attribute-based stated-preference method that values non-market goods by describing them as bundles of characteristics and asking respondents to choose repeatedly among competing alternatives — one of which always carries a cost. Grounded in random utility the

2 sources1974
marketing research

Choice-Based Conjoint

Choice-based conjoint analysis (CBC) measures how consumers value the features of a product by observing the choices they make among competing, attribute-defined profiles rather than by asking them to rate attributes directly. Each respondent completes a series of choice tasks, picking the single most preferred alterna

3 sources1983
tourism management

Citizen Satisfaction Survey

The Citizen Satisfaction Survey (CSS) measures public satisfaction with government services, infrastructure, and institutions across multiple dimensions (access, responsiveness, quality, fairness, transparency). Rooted in expectancy-disconfirmation theory (James, 2009) and the American Customer Satisfaction Index (Forn

4 sources1996
organizational behavior

Common Method Bias Remedies

Common method bias remedies are the procedural and statistical tools researchers use to detect and reduce the spurious covariance that arises when constructs are measured with the same method — typically a single self-report survey. Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, and Podsakoff's 2003 review crystallized the problem, catalo

3 sources2003
marketing research

Conjoint Market Simulator

A conjoint market simulator turns the part-worth utilities estimated from a conjoint or discrete-choice study into predicted shares of preference for a set of competing products, letting analysts run 'what if' experiments on product design and pricing. Once each respondent's utilities are known, any product configurati

3 sources1999
economics

Contingent Valuation Method

The contingent valuation method (CVM) is a survey-based stated-preference technique for estimating the economic value people place on goods that are not traded in markets — clean air, an endangered species, a wilderness area, the existence of a natural resource. Respondents are presented with a carefully constructed hy

2 sources1963
organizational behavior

Core Self-Evaluations Scale

The Core Self-Evaluations Scale (CSES) measures fundamental assessments people make about their own worth, competence, and ability to meet life demands. Developed by Judge and colleagues starting in 1997, the 12-item scale captures a broad personality dimension encompassing self-esteem, self-efficacy, locus of control,

3 sources1997
strategic management

Corporate Governance Questionnaire

Corporate Governance encompasses the system of rules, practices, and processes by which a company is directed and controlled. Jensen and Meckling's (1976) agency theory formalized the principal-agent problem—how to ensure management (agents) acts in shareholders' (principals') interests despite information asymmetry an

3 sources1976
accounting

Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis

Cost-Volume-Profit (CVP) Analysis is a foundational managerial accounting method that examines the relationships among costs, sales volume, and profit. By analyzing how changes in production volume, selling price, and cost structure affect profitability, managers can make informed decisions about pricing, production, a

2 sources1940
organizational behavior

CSR Scale

The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Scale is a 19-item instrument measuring organizational commitment to social and environmental responsibilities across multiple stakeholder dimensions. Formalized by Turker in 2009, the CSR Scale assesses employee perception of organizational CSR practices toward society, employ

2 sources2009
marketing

Customer Equity Modeling

Customer equity modeling treats a firm's customers as financial assets and defines the value of the firm's customer base as the sum of the discounted lifetime values of its current and future customers. The idea was crystallized by Robert Blattberg and John Deighton, who proposed managing marketing by the 'customer equ

2 sources2004
marketing

Customer Journey Analysis

Customer journey analysis is the systematic mapping and measurement of the full sequence of touchpoints a customer experiences with a firm, across the prepurchase, purchase and postpurchase stages, in order to understand and improve the end-to-end customer experience. It reflects a shift from evaluating isolated intera

1 source2016
marketing

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journey Mapping is a service design methodology that visualizes the complete customer experience across all touchpoints and phases of a customer relationship, from awareness through advocacy. Developed through work in design and service management, journey mapping integrates behavioral data, customer emotions,

3 sources2000
marketing

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a financial metric that quantifies the total profit a company expects to generate from its relationship with a customer over the entire duration of that relationship. Developed through work by Blattberg, Getz, and Thomas in the 1990s-2000s, CLV integrates acquisition costs, purchase beh

3 sources1996
marketing management

Customer Loyalty Scale

The Customer Loyalty Scale (CLS) measures customer loyalty as a combination of attitudinal commitment and behavioral intention. Developed by Dick and Basu (1994), the scale distinguishes between behavioral loyalty (repeat purchases) and attitudinal loyalty (emotional commitment), recognizing that true loyalty involves

2 sources1994
strategic management

Delphi Method for Strategy Foresight

The Delphi method is a structured process for combining the judgments of a panel of experts on questions where hard data are scarce - long-range forecasts, emerging technologies, and strategic uncertainties - through several rounds of anonymous response and controlled feedback. Linstone and Turoff's 1975 collection The

2 sources1975
organizational behavior

Denison Organizational Culture Survey

The Denison Organizational Culture Survey (DOCS) measures organizational culture in terms of its link to performance, building on Daniel Denison and Aneil Mishra's theory that effective organizations share recognizable cultural traits. The model identifies four traits — involvement, consistency, adaptability, and missi

2 sources1995
tourism management

Destination Image Scale

The Destination Image Scale (DIS) measures how potential or actual visitors perceive and emotionally evaluate a tourism destination. Developed by Echtner & Ritchie (1991) and extended by Baloglu & Brinberg (1997), it captures both rational beliefs about destination attributes (attractions, climate, value, safety) and a

4 sources1991
tourism

Destination Net Promoter Analysis

Destination net promoter analysis adapts the Net Promoter Score, introduced by Frederick Reichheld (2003), to the measurement of destination advocacy. It rests on a single survey question, how likely a visitor is, on a 0-to-10 scale, to recommend the destination to a friend or colleague, and converts the answers into a

2 sources2003
marketing

Diffusion of Innovation Model

The Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) model is a theoretical framework developed by Everett Rogers in 1962 to explain how innovations spread through populations over time. The framework categorizes adopters into five groups based on when they adopt an innovation and describes the characteristic S-shaped curve that typicall

3 sources1962
strategic management

Digital Transformation Readiness Scale

Digital Transformation Readiness refers to an organization's preparedness to successfully adopt digital technologies, redesign business processes, and develop new digital capabilities to compete in increasingly digital markets. Westerman, Bonnet, and McAfee (2014) identify nine elements of digital transformation spanni

3 sources2014
tourism hospitality

DINESERV Restaurant Service Quality Scale

DINESERV is a 29-item instrument developed by Stevens, Knutson, and Patton in 1995 to measure perceived service quality in restaurants. It adapts the five generic SERVQUAL dimensions of Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry — tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy — to the specific realities of foods

2 sources1995
strategic management

Dynamic Capabilities Measurement

Dynamic capabilities are a firm's higher-order abilities to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments. Teece, Pisano, and Shuen's 1997 article introduced the construct to explain why some firms renew their advantage under technological change while othe

2 sources1997
strategic management

Dynamic Capabilities Scale

Dynamic Capabilities (DC) represent an organization's capacity to sense new opportunities and threats, seize those opportunities through strategic investments and organizational changes, and reconfigure assets and organizational structures to adapt to shifting competitive environments. Teece (2007) articulated this fra

3 sources2007
tourism management

E-Government Adoption Scale

The E-Government Adoption Scale (EGAS) measures citizens' willingness to adopt and use digital government services (e-permits, e-tax, e-voting, e-tourism information services, online licensing) based on Technology Acceptance Model principles (Venkatesh & Davis, 2000) extended to government contexts (Belanger et al., 20

4 sources2000
marketing management

E-S-QUAL Electronic Service Quality Scale

E-S-QUAL is a 22-item scale developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Malhotra (2005) to measure service quality in electronic commerce and digital service environments. Adapting the foundational SERVQUAL dimensions to online contexts, E-S-QUAL assesses four core dimensions: Efficiency (ability to complete transactions q

2 sources2005
organizational behavior

Emotional Labor Scale

The Emotional Labor Scale measures the effort employees expend managing their feelings to meet the emotional display rules their jobs require, a phenomenon Arlie Hochschild named emotional labor in her 1983 book The Managed Heart. Studying flight attendants and bill collectors, Hochschild showed that organizations sell

3 sources1983
organizational behavior

Employee Engagement Survey

The Employee Engagement Survey, grounded in Schaufeli and Bakker's Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES), is a 17-item instrument measuring occupational engagement across three dimensions: vigor, dedication, and absorption. Originally developed in 2002, the EES assesses the positive psychological state of work engagemen

2 sources2002
organizational behavior

Empowering Leadership Scale

The Empowering Leadership Scale measures the extent to which leaders share power with and build the self-influence of their subordinates rather than directing them from the top down. Empowering leadership describes a set of behaviors — enhancing the meaningfulness of work, fostering participation in decisions, expressi

2 sources2005
organizational behavior

Entrepreneurial Intention Questionnaire

The Entrepreneurial Intention Questionnaire (EIQ) is a 6-item self-report instrument designed to measure an individual's intention to start a new business. Developed by Liñán and Chen in 2009, it is grounded in the Theory of Planned Behavior and has become widely used across entrepreneurship research and education. The

3 sources2009
strategic management

Entrepreneurial Orientation Scale

The Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) Scale, developed by Danny Miller (1983), measures the extent to which an organization exhibits strategic postures characteristic of entrepreneurship. It assesses three core dimensions—innovativeness, risk-taking, and proactiveness—that distinguish entrepreneurial from conservative f

3 sources1983
organizational behavior

Ethical Leadership Scale

The Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS) is a 10-item instrument measuring the degree to which leaders model ethical behavior and hold followers accountable to ethical standards. Developed by Brown, Treviño, and Harrison in 2005, the ELS operationalizes ethical leadership, assessing leader conduct and norm-setting that shape

2 sources2005
marketing

Eye-Tracking in Advertising Research

Eye-tracking in advertising and packaging research measures where, when, and for how long consumers look at marketing stimuli, turning raw gaze into an objective record of visual attention. A camera-based eye-tracker samples the point of regard many times per second, and the resulting stream is parsed into fixations (r

1 source2008
marketing

Facial Coding in Advertising Research

Facial coding measures consumers' emotional responses to advertising by analyzing the movements of their faces while they watch. It rests on Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen's Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which decomposes any expression into elemental action units, the contractions of individual facial muscles suc

2 sources1978
accounting

Fraud Risk Assessment

Fraud Risk Assessment is a structured audit methodology required by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) for identifying and evaluating risks that financial statements could be materially misstated due to fraud. Unlike audit risk assessment focused on error, fraud assessment considers intentio

2 sources2002
marketing research

Gabor-Granger Pricing

The Gabor-Granger method is a direct pricing-research technique that estimates a product's demand curve by asking respondents whether they would buy it at each of several price points. Developed by economists André Gabor and Clive Granger in the 1960s through surveys of how consumers perceive and react to prices, it as

2 sources1966
accounting

Going Concern Evaluation

Going Concern Evaluation is an auditor framework for assessing whether the entity being audited will be able to continue operating and meeting its obligations in the foreseeable future (typically, one year from the financial statement date). Required by auditing standards, this assessment examines financial and operati

2 sources1988
marketing management

HEdPERF Higher Education Performance Scale

HEdPERF is a 41-item scale designed specifically to measure service quality in higher education contexts, developed by Srikanthan and Dalrymple (2003). Extending SERVQUAL's framework to academic environments, HEdPERF captures unique dimensions of educational service: Academic Aspects (teaching quality, curriculum relev

2 sources2003
tourism

Heritage Contingent Valuation

Heritage contingent valuation applies the contingent valuation method (CVM) to cultural and heritage tourism, estimating the monetary value people place on conserving, restoring or accessing historic buildings, monuments, sites and artifacts. Because heritage delivers benefits that markets do not price, including the s

2 sources1989
tourism hospitality

HISTOQUAL Heritage Service Quality Scale

HISTOQUAL is a service-quality assessment scale developed by Isabelle Frochot and Howard Hughes in 2000 specifically for historic houses and, by extension, heritage attractions. Recognizing that the generic SERVQUAL model did not fully capture the heritage visitor experience, the authors retained three SERVQUAL dimensi

2 sources2000
tourism management

Hotel Service Quality Scale

The Hotel Service Quality Scale (HSQS), including the Lodging Quality Index (LQI) developed by Getty & Getty (2003), measures guest perceptions of hotel service quality across multiple dimensions (room comfort, staff responsiveness, facilities, value). Using expectancy-disconfirmation theory, it captures not only perce

4 sources2003