Attachment to Possessions Scale

1. Abstract

The Attachment to Possessions Scale (APS), originally conceptualized and psychometrically operationalized by A. Dwayne Ball and Lori H. Tasaki in 1992, represents a foundational measurement instrument in consumer psychology, behavioral economics, and the study of material culture. The scale quantifies the extent to which an individual uses an object or material possession to define, maintain, and express their personal and social identity—a core theoretical mechanism known as the extended self. Developed through rigorous exploratory and confirmatory stages involving qualitative elicitation, pool generation, and structural refinement, the resulting unidimensional instrument comprises 9 self-report items evaluated on a 6-point Likert-type response format anchored from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 6 (“Strongly Agree”). Across foundational and independent cross-validation cohorts, the APS exhibits exceptional internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely ranging between 0.88 and 0.93, along with substantial item-total correlations exceeding 0.70 and single-factor principal loadings consistently exceeding 0.75.

The instrument provides robust predictive and construct validity, differentiating functionally replaceable commodities from psychologically inalienable objects. Elevated scores on the APS reliably forecast emotional distress following involuntary loss, severe resistance to disposition, divergence between subjective valuation and fair market value (the endowment effect), and an unwillingness to trade the object for functional equivalents. Antecedents such as the duration of ownership, acquisition mode (gifted or inherited versus self-purchased), and perceived irreplaceable autobiographical links significantly correlate with APS scores. This comprehensive review synthesizes the psychometric properties, theoretical architectures, structural factor parameters, and empirical applications of the APS across academic disciplines.

2. Keywords

Attachment to Possessions Scale, extended self, material possession attachment, consumer psychology, endowment effect, inalienable wealth, object disposition, product loss, consumer behavior, psychometrics

3. Authors

The Attachment to Possessions Scale was authored by:

• A. Dwayne Ball, Ph.D. — Emeritus Associate Professor of Marketing at the College of Business, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Dr. Ball’s scholarly program focuses on consumer measurement, psychometrics, customer loyalty, relationship marketing, and statistical methodology in behavioral research.
• Lori H. Tasaki, Ph.D. — Researcher and behavioral scientist affiliated with the Department of Marketing, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, whose collaborative scholarship investigates consumer identification, possession meanings, and communicative dimensions of material goods.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attachment to Possessions Scale is to deliver a reliable, psychometrically standardized mechanism for capturing the psychological bond linking a consumer to a specific, tangible object. Prior to the operationalization of the APS by Ball and Tasaki in 1992, consumer research frequently conflated possession attachment with related but conceptually distinct phenomena, such as brand loyalty, generalized materialism, product involvement, perceived product utility, or impulsive acquisition tendencies. Researchers lacked an empirical instrument capable of assessing why two objectively identical consumer items—such as two mass-produced watches or motor vehicles—could elicit starkly contrasting emotional and behavioral commitments from their respective owners.

From an applied research perspective, the APS provides empirical utility across clinical, sociological, and commercial domains. In economic and consumer contexts, the scale explains significant deviations from rational choice theory. It elucidates the psychological mechanisms underlying the endowment effect, consumer resistance to upgrade cycles, and the phenomenon of post-purchase consumer-brand alignment. In clinical and developmental psychology, variations of possession attachment offer diagnostic and analytical insights into hoarding pathology, bereavement-related object anchoring, transitional object dependency, and age-related downsizing crises experienced by aging adults forced to divest from lifelong homes. Furthermore, the scale facilitates systematic investigations into the traumatic consequences of natural disasters, residential burglaries, and forced migration, where the involuntary destruction or confiscation of belongings causes profound identity disruption.

The theoretical rationale of the APS is rooted in identity maintenance. Humans do not merely use objects for instrumental utility; they imbue physical matter with symbolic, emotional, and autobiographical narratives. When an object enters the self-concept, separation from it threatens psychological equilibrium. The APS was engineered to measure this psychological fusion, enabling researchers to quantify how deeply an external artifact has been integrated into an individual’s personal architecture of identity.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the APS is possession attachment, formally defined as the degree to which an individual uses a specific possession to instantiate, maintain, signify, and enrich their identity. Possession attachment is an inherently object-specific, psychological state rather than a stable personality trait like general materialism or compulsive buying tendencies. While a highly materialistic individual may crave the acquisition of status-conferring goods in aggregate, possession attachment pertains to an idiosyncratic emotional and psychological bond established with a designated, individual artifact.

Although the validated scale is unidimensional in its structural configuration, the underlying construct encompasses three key psychological dynamics:

• Self-Extension and Self-Definition: The degree to which an object serves as an external cognitive scaffolding for personal identity. An individual with high attachment perceives the possession as a tangible manifestation of the self (e.g., “If I lost this object, I would feel as though part of me were gone”). The possession reinforces autobiographical continuity, reminding the person of who they were, who they are, and who they aspire to be.
• Emotional and Autobiographical Inalienability: The non-fungibility of the possession. For unattached consumers, a damaged or lost item is easily replaced through monetary transactions and functional substitution. For an attached consumer, the object possesses historical provenance and indexical authenticity; it is linked to significant personal milestones, deceased relatives, rites of passage, or transformative interpersonal relationships. It cannot be compensated for by an identical off-the-shelf unit.
• Distress and Separation Anxiety: The emotional reactivity associated with anticipated or actual dispossession. Consumers exhibiting elevated levels of possession attachment experience acute distress, anxiety, and behavioral resistance when confronted with the prospect of selling, discarding, donating, or losing the artifact.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Attachment to Possessions Scale is fundamentally rooted in Russell Belk’s seminal conceptualization of the Extended Self (Belk, 1988). Belk postulated that our self-identities are not confined within our biological organisms; rather, humans intentionally and subconsciously integrate external entities—including possessions, places, persons, and ideas—into their identity system. According to Belk, possessions serve as major contributors to and reflections of our identities. Instrumental items become emotional repositories, housing autobiographical memories, projecting personal values to external audiences, and providing cognitive comfort during developmental or contextual transitions.

The scale also synthesizes insights from classical attachment theory, pioneered by John Bowlby and extended by Donald Winnicott regarding transitional objects. Winnicott observed that young infants utilize soft, soothing objects (such as blankets or teddy bears) to bridge the developmental chasm between subjective omnipotence and objective reality, using the material possession to regulate anxiety in the absence of the primary caregiver. Ball and Tasaki recognized that this dynamic persists throughout adulthood: adults continually employ curated possessions to navigate identity threats, reinforce emotional security, and mediate interpersonal transitions.

Additionally, the theoretical framework incorporates anthropological concepts of inalienable possessions (Weiner, 1992). Inalienable possessions are goods imbued with affective and historical qualities that resist commodification. While commodity exchange relies on equivalency and market exchangeability, attached possessions are extracted from the market sphere and sacredly elevated. Consequently, standard rational-utility models of economics fail when predicting behavior surrounding attached goods, necessitating an operational scale capable of quantifying this psychological bond.

7. Validity

The Attachment to Possessions Scale has undergone extensive psychometric validation, establishing robust evidence for construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related predictive validity:

• Construct and Convergent Validity: In the initial validation studies by Ball and Tasaki (1992), construct validity was confirmed through positive, statistically significant associations with established measures of emotional importance, subjective nostalgia, and product involvement. Possessions acquired through sentimental social avenues (e.g., inherited family heirlooms, gifts from romantic partners) demonstrated significantly higher mean scores ($p < 0.001$) compared to utilitarian items purchased via conventional transactional retail channels.
• Discriminant Validity: Discriminant validity was empirically demonstrated by distinguishing the APS from Richins and Dawson’s Material Values Scale (MVS). While generalized materialism measures an acquisitive orientation focused on material possessions as markers of success and happiness, the APS measures attachment to individual, idiosyncratic artifacts. Correlations between general materialism and the APS were moderate to weak ($r = 0.15 – 0.28$), confirming that one need not be generally materialistic to form profound psychological attachments to specific possessions.
• Predictive and Criterion Validity: The APS reliably forecasts concrete behavioral and emotional responses across diverse experimental settings:
• Resistance to Disposal: Scores on the APS predict an individual’s refusal to discard, sell, or trade an object, even when offered compensation well above fair market value.
• Willingness to Pay for Restoration: In scenarios simulating product damage, high-attachment individuals exhibit an elevated willingness to pay exorbitant repair costs rather than purchase a brand-new, functionally superior replacement.
• Post-Loss Distress: Studies examining victims of residential fires, flooding, and theft demonstrate that pre-loss or recalled APS scores directly correlate with the severity of psychological trauma, bereavement responses, and grief severity independent of the monetary value of the lost assets.

8. Reliability

The APS demonstrates consistently high reliability across diverse demographic strata, cultural contexts, and product categories:

• Internal Consistency: In the foundational validation studies conducted by Ball and Tasaki (1992), the 9-item scale yielded Cronbach’s alpha coefficients between 0.88 and 0.93 across independent development samples. Subsequent replications across various categories (e.g., motor vehicles, musical instruments, consumer electronics, clothing) have consistently reported internal reliability figures well above the accepted 0.80 psychometric threshold, typically stabilizing between $\alpha = 0.89$ and $\alpha = 0.94$.
• Split-Half and Composite Reliability: Confirmatory structural evaluations report composite reliability (CR) metrics consistently exceeding 0.91, paired with average variance extracted (AVE) estimates routinely exceeding 0.55, indicating that variance captured by the construct substantially outweighs measurement error variance.
• Test-Retest Stability: Over longitudinal testing intervals of 4 to 8 weeks, the APS demonstrates strong temporal stability ($r_{tt} = 0.82 – 0.87$) when applied to enduring autobiographical possessions. When applied to transient or recently acquired items, minor fluctuations are observed, accurately capturing natural longitudinal decay or growth in psychological bonding.

9. Factor Analysis

During the scale’s initial development, an extensive item pool reflecting possession-related identity mechanisms was subjected to Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using principal axis factoring with orthogonal and oblique rotations. The results clearly demonstrated that a single dominant factor accounted for the vast majority of the common variance (over 58% of the total variance in the primary extraction phase).

The eigenvalue scree plot exhibited a sharp drop-off after the first factor, confirming a strictly unidimensional structure. In the finalized 9-item solution, all individual items demonstrated salient factor loadings well above the classical 0.40 cutoff, with all loadings falling between 0.75 and 0.86. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) performed on subsequent consumer cohorts confirmed excellent model fit for the single-factor structure:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently exceed 0.95 (typically $ge 0.97$).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values routinely exceed 0.96.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates typically fall between 0.042 and 0.058, well within the recommended threshold for good model fit.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values are generally below 0.035.

Attempts to extract multidimensional models (such as separating public identity signaling from private sentimental anchoring) have generally yielded over-factoring or highly correlated dimensions ($r > 0.85$), supporting the retention of the parsimonious, single-factor 9-item model for both empirical and applied research.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Attachment to Possessions Scale is formatted as a standardized, brief, self-administered questionnaire. Its administration characteristics are summarized as follows:

• Test Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale.
• Format: Pen-and-paper or digital survey administration.
• Item Count: 9 standardized items in the definitive unidimensional version (distilled from an initial 16-item developmental instrument).
• Target Stimulus: The respondent evaluates a specific, designated possession (e.g., “my car,” “this piece of jewelry,” “my smartphone”).
• Response Scale: 6-point Likert-type scale, typically structured as:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Slightly Disagree
  • 4 = Slightly Agree
  • 5 = Agree
  • 6 = Strongly Agree

  (Note: Some researchers adapt the scale to a 7-point Likert format including an explicit neutral midpoint “Neither Agree nor Disagree”).

• Scoring Rules:
  • All 9 items are worded in the positive direction; there are no reverse-coded items in the final 9-item version.
  • A continuous composite score is calculated either by summing the numerical responses across all 9 items (yielding a score range of 9 to 54) or by computing the arithmetic mean across completed items (yielding a score range of 1.0 to 6.0).
  • Higher aggregate or mean scores reflect a deeper, more identity-defining psychological attachment to the specified possession.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attachment to Possessions Scale was published in 1992 in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. As an academic measurement tool published in peer-reviewed scientific literature, the scale is widely accessible for non-commercial academic, psychological, and institutional research purposes without financial licensing fees, provided proper attribution and citation are given to the original authors (Ball & Tasaki, 1992).

Researchers intending to integrate the APS into commercial market research tools, proprietary diagnostic software, or corporate product-design protocols are advised to consult the copyright policies of the publisher (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates / Taylor & Francis / Society for Consumer Psychology) to secure appropriate rights and commercial permissions.

12. References

Ball, A. D., & Tasaki, L. H. (1992). The role and measurement of attachment in consumer behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 1(2), 155–172. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1057-7408(08)80055-1

Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154

Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books.

Kleine, S. S., Kleine, R. E., & Allen, C. T. (1995). How is a possession “me” or “not me”? Characterizing types and an antecedent of material possession attachment. Journal of Consumer Research, 22(3), 327–343. https://doi.org/10.1086/209454

Richins, M. L., & Dawson, S. (1992). A consumer values orientation for materialism and its measurement: Scale development and validation. Journal of Consumer Research, 19(3), 303–316. https://doi.org/10.1086/209304

Weiner, A. B. (1992). Inalienable possessions: The paradox of keeping-while-giving. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520911833

Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena—a study of the first not-me possession. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34(2), 89–97.

13. Items of the Scale