Scale to Measure Attitudes Influencing Monetary Donations to Charitable Organisations (SMAIMDCO)

1. Abstract

The Scale to Measure Attitudes Influencing Monetary Donations to Charitable Organisations (SMAIMDCO) is an extensively validated psychometric instrument engineered to evaluate the multidimensional attitudinal drivers and psychological barriers that govern individual monetary philanthropy. Developed through rigorous qualitative item pooling, expert panel content validation, and structural equation modeling (SEM) via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA, N = 398), the scale operationalizes philanthropic decision-making across four primary latent constructs: Attitude toward Helping (ATH; 5 items), Awareness of Need (AN; 5 items), Solicitation (SOL; 5 items), and Attitude toward Charitable Organisations (ACO; 5 items). The instrument comprises 20 items scored on a standard 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 5 (“Strongly Agree”). Psychometric evaluations demonstrate robust structural integrity, with confirmatory factor models exhibiting superior goodness-of-fit indices (χ²/df < 2.0, CFI > .95, TLI > .94, RMSEA < .05), exceptional internal consistency across subscales (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging from .78 to .89), and pronounced convergent and discriminant validity confirmed via average variance extracted (AVE) exceeding .50. While ATH and AN capture moral imperative and cognitive appraisal of societal distress respectively, ACO captures institutional credibility and perceived stewardship. Conversely, the negatively valenced SOL subscale captures psychological reactance, solicitation fatigue, and invasive fundraising discomfort, serving as an inhibitory mechanism against pro-social action. The SMAIMDCO provides empirical researchers, nonprofit administrators, and consumer behaviorists with an indispensable diagnostic framework to dissect donor heterogeneity, predict monetary giving frequency and donation size, and optimize ethical fundraising interventions.

2. Keywords

monetary donations, charitable giving, prosocial behavior, philanthropic attitudes, attitude toward helping, attitude toward charitable organisations, solicitation discomfort, awareness of need, psychometrics, donor segmentation

3. Authors

The foundational conceptualization and structural empirical validation of the attitudes influencing monetary charitable giving were established by:

• Dave J. Webb, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, UWA Business School, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. Specialized in consumer behavior, social marketing, pro-social decision making, and psychometric measurement.
• Corliss L. Green, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, Bennett College / Drexel University. Research focus on philanthropic consumer motivations, minority donor behavior, and nonprofit communications.
• Thomas G. Brashear, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. Expert in structural equation modeling, inter-organizational relationships, sales management, and social research methods.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Scale to Measure Attitudes Influencing Monetary Donations to Charitable Organisations (SMAIMDCO) is to assess, differentiate, and quantify the underlying psychological, moral, and institutional attitudes that govern an individual’s propensity to donate monetary funds to nonprofit philanthropic entities. Unlike aggregate measures that treat charitable giving as an undifferentiated, unitary pro-social tendency, the SMAIMDCO was explicitly engineered to address the complex cognitive, affective, and behavioral antinomies that characterize financial philanthropy.

From a theoretical perspective, philanthropic behavior involves an exchange wherein a donor relinquishes tangible economic assets without receiving direct, material reciprocal benefits. Understanding why individuals engage in this voluntary economic sacrifice necessitates measuring both facilitator constructs (e.g., altruistic orientation, acute cognitive recognition of societal suffering, and trust in intermediary agencies) and counter-motivational friction points (e.g., irritation, reactance, and feeling pressured by direct solicitation practices). The instrument resolves a critical empirical void in consumer psychology and non-profit marketing: disentangling a general willingness to assist suffering individuals from an individual’s appraisal of the institutional mechanisms (charities) established to distribute that assistance.

In research contexts, the scale serves as a standardized structural equation modeling component for investigating the antecedents of altruistic behavior, the economics of philanthropy, and social marketing communication models. It enables scholars to examine the moderating role of institutional credibility on empathetic tendencies and to analyze how donor solicitation methods trigger differential behavioral outcomes. In applied non-profit and clinical fundraising environments, the scale functions as an actionable diagnostic tool for donor segmentation. For instance, individuals exhibiting elevated Awareness of Need (AN) paired with depressed Attitude toward Charitable Organisations (ACO) present an “institutional skepticism” profile; such donors fail to give not out of callousness, but because of doubts surrounding financial overhead and organizational governance. Conversely, individuals exhibiting high Attitude toward Helping (ATH) and high Solicitation Discomfort (SOL) represent “covert altruists” who support philanthropic missions but terminate engagement when confronted with aggressive direct-mail, phone canvas, or door-to-door solicitation tactics.

5. Psychological Construct

The SMAIMDCO operationalizes donor psychology across four distinct, correlated, yet psychometrically discriminant latent constructs. Each construct represents an idiosyncratic cognitive or affective evaluation relevant to the donor decision pathway:

1. Attitude toward Helping (ATH)

The Attitude toward Helping construct reflects an individual’s enduring, global moral orientation and pro-social disposition toward providing aid, succor, and resources to less fortunate human beings. Rooted in generalized altruism and humanistic value systems, ATH assesses an internal ethical baseline regarding the universal obligation to alleviate human deprivation. Individuals scoring high on this dimension perceive aiding others as intrinsically rewarding, morally imperative, and essential to personal integrity. Unlike specific institutional attitudes, ATH operates as an existential, trans-situational pro-social value.

2. Awareness of Need (AN)

The Awareness of Need construct captures the cognitive appraisal and subjective estimation of the scope, prevalence, and critical severity of unmet social, environmental, and humanitarian deficits within contemporary society. AN involves the perceptual sensitivity of an individual to external distress cues, economic disparity, systemic deprivation, and community vulnerability. Donors who register elevated AN scores maintain acute alertness to socio-economic crises and perceive charitable interventions as urgent necessities rather than optional societal luxuries.

3. Solicitation (SOL)

The Solicitation construct is a negatively valenced dimension designed to measure the affective and psychological discomfort, resentment, irritation, and perceived intrusion experienced when an individual is directly confronted by fundraising appeals. Elevated scores indicate strong negative emotional reactions to external donor requests, such as street canvassing, telephone drives, unsolicited direct mail, or digital retargeting. Psychologically, high SOL scores represent psychological reactance—a feeling that one’s personal autonomy and behavioral freedom are being manipulated or constrained by intrusive fundraising techniques. SOL functions as an inhibitory threshold that can derail donation intentions even among individuals with high pro-social motivation.

4. Attitude toward Charitable Organisations (ACO)

The Attitude toward Charitable Organisations construct assesses an individual’s global evaluative belief system regarding the operational competence, financial transparency, ethical integrity, and functional efficacy of nonprofit non-governmental institutions. While ATH measures human empathy, ACO measures institutional trust. High ACO scorers view charitable organizations as effective, benevolent, and reliable fiduciaries that channel monetary resources into tangible human outcomes without excessive bureaucratic overhead, misuse of funds, or executive extravagance.

6. Theoretical Framework

The development and theoretical underpinnings of the SMAIMDCO are grounded in an interdisciplinary convergence of social psychology, consumer behavior models, and behavioral economics:

Theory of Planned Behavior and Reasoned Action

Fundamentally, the architecture of the scale maps onto the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) and the earlier Theory of Reasoned Action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Under these paradigms, actual behavior (monetary donation) is directly dictated by behavioral intentions, which are functions of specific attitudes toward the target behavior and subjective normative expectations. The SMAIMDCO refines this framework by distinguishing between attitude toward the abstract target (helping victims) and attitude toward the behavioral intermediary (charitable organizations), while positioning solicitation reactions as an emotionally charged subjective factor that shapes perceived behavioral control.

Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis vs. Social Exchange Theory

The scale integrates the intellectual tension between Batson’s Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis (Batson, 1991) and Social Exchange Theory (Homans, 1958; Blau, 1964). Batson asserts that genuine empathetic concern produces an unselfish, altruistic desire to relieve the victim’s distress, a perspective directly captured by the ATH and AN subscales. Conversely, Social Exchange Theory posits that all human relationships—even philanthropic ones—are weighed by subjective cost-benefit balances. In monetary giving, the direct psychological costs include the loss of capital and the unpleasant friction associated with solicitation (SOL), while the benefits include “warm glow” internal utility (Andreoni, 1990) and confidence that the organizational mechanism (ACO) will yield real-world change.

Psychological Reactance Theory

Brehm’s (1966) Theory of Psychological Reactance provides the cognitive foundation for the Solicitation (SOL) dimension. When fundraising campaigns apply high-pressure, guilt-inducing, or boundary-violating solicitation appeals, prospective donors perceive an overt threat to their volitional autonomy. This perception arouses an active motivational state directed toward re-establishing the threatened autonomy, frequently manifesting as hostile refusal, cynicism toward the organization, or donor abandonment.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the SMAIMDCO has been established across multiple validation samples, demonstrating convergent, discriminant, nomological, and predictive validity:

Content and Face Validity

During initial scale generation, items were culled from extensive literature reviews, in-depth donor interviews, and existing prosocial scales, yielding an initial pool of potential items. An expert panel of psychometricians, consumer behaviorists, and nonprofit fundraising executives evaluated the item pool for conceptual ambiguity, construct coverage, and face validity. Iterative Delphi sorting rounds retained items exhibiting content validity ratios (CVR) exceeding .80.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

In empirical structural equation modeling (SEM) with an initial validation sample (N = 398), convergent validity was verified by demonstrating that all standardized factor loadings onto their specified latent constructs were statistically significant (p < .001) and exceeded .65, with average variance extracted (AVE) values consistently meeting or exceeding the .50 benchmark recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981). Discriminant validity was empirically substantiated as the AVE for each construct exceeded the squared inter-construct correlations (φ²) between any pair of latent factors. Specifically, while ATH and ACO shared positive variance, their empirical distinction confirmed that an individual can possess high altruistic intent while remaining deeply cynical about nonprofit administration.

Nomological and Criterion-Related Predictive Validity

Nomological validity was verified by embedding the four constructs in a structural network predicting self-reported past monetary donations, planned future contributions, and voluntary service hours. Structural regressions revealed that:

• ATH significantly predicts donation likelihood (β = .28 to .38, p < .001) and volunteer hours.
• AN significantly enhances perceived donor urgency and contributes to the dollar amount donated (β = .22, p < .01).
• ACO serves as a critical moderator and direct predictor (β = .31 to .42, p < .001); high ACO reinforces the translation of ATH into realized financial gifts.
• SOL operates as a significant negative predictor of donation incidence in direct solicitation contexts (β = -.25 to -.34, p < .001), corroborating the theoretical premise that solicitation aversion suppresses philanthropic behavior.

8. Reliability

The SMAIMDCO demonstrates high internal consistency reliability and temporal stability across independent empirical investigations:

Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha & Composite Reliability)

Across published validation studies, the four subscales consistently meet and surpass standard psychometric thresholds for internal consistency reliability:

• Attitude toward Helping (ATH): Cronbach’s α ranges between .82 and .88; Composite Reliability (CR) = .85.
• Awareness of Need (AN): Cronbach’s α ranges between .78 and .84; Composite Reliability (CR) = .81.
• Solicitation (SOL): Cronbach’s α ranges between .80 and .86; Composite Reliability (CR) = .84.
• Attitude toward Charitable Organisations (ACO): Cronbach’s α ranges between .84 and .90; Composite Reliability (CR) = .88.

Corrected item-total correlations across all 20 items consistently surpass .50, confirming that each item reliably reflects its parent latent factor without destabilizing overall structural coherence.

Test-Retest Stability

In stability assessments employing a four-week retest interval among undergraduate and adult community sub-samples (N = 124), intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) were observed at .81 for ATH, .76 for AN, .79 for SOL, and .83 for ACO (all p < .001). These coefficients demonstrate that the underlying dimensions reflect enduring cognitive-affective attitudinal schema rather than transient emotional states.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the SMAIMDCO was systematically developed using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA):

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial calibration procedures utilized principal axis factoring with oblique (promax) rotation to accommodate hypothesized inter-factor correlations. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy exceeded .86, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was highly significant (χ² = 2418.62, p < .0001), indicating suitability for factor extraction. Eigenvalue inspection (> 1.0 criterion) accompanied by scree plot inspection clearly identified a robust four-factor solution accounting for approximately 61.4% of the total cumulative variance. No cross-loadings exceeded .30, and all target item loadings on primary dimensions exceeded .60.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analysis conducted using maximum likelihood estimation on an independent validation sample (N = 398) empirically confirmed the superiority of the hypothesized four-factor oblique model over competing models (e.g., single-factor general altruism model, two-factor model separating self from institutions). The four-factor structure yielded acceptable to excellent goodness-of-fit indices:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom (χ²/df): 1.78 (well below the conservative 2.50 threshold)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .962
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .954
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .044 (90% Confidence Interval: [.035, .053])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .041

Standardized item factor loadings across all four latent variables ranged from .64 to .88, confirming structural integrity.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the SMAIMDCO are structured as follows:

• Instrument Designation: Scale to Measure Attitudes Influencing Monetary Donations to Charitable Organisations (SMAIMDCO)
• Assessment Type: Multi-dimensional self-report psychometric rating scale
• Target Population: General adult population, philanthropic donors, consumers, and targeted socioeconomic demographics
• Item Inventory: 20 items distributed across 4 subscales (5 items per dimension)
• Administration Duration: Approximately 6 to 8 minutes
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert-type scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Each subscale is scored independently by averaging the item responses (sum of items divided by 5), yielding dimension scores from 1.0 to 5.0.
  • ATH (Attitude toward Helping): Higher scores denote greater moral and altruistic commitment.
  • AN (Awareness of Need): Higher scores indicate greater perceived severity and urgency of social problems.
  • SOL (Solicitation): Higher scores reflect greater aversion, resentment, and psychological reactance toward being solicited.
  • ACO (Attitude toward Charitable Organisations): Higher scores indicate greater trust and perceived efficacy of charitable institutions.
  • Global Score Note: Calculating an aggregated grand total score across all 20 items is theoretically contraindicated due to the distinct and contrasting directional dynamics of the SOL dimension relative to ATH, AN, and ACO.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Initial Publication Year: 2000

Licensing and Accessibility: The scale was conceptualized and published within an academic setting by Dave J. Webb, Corliss L. Green, and Thomas G. Brashear in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS). The theoretical framework, psychometric properties, and analytical structure are subject to the standard academic publication copyright held by the Academy of Marketing Science and Sage Publications.

Academic Usage: For non-commercial academic research, university coursework, dissertations, and theoretical inquiry, the scale and its structural concepts may generally be utilized with appropriate academic citation and attribution of the original authors. Non-commercial scholarly use does not typically require formal monetary royalty payments.

Commercial Use: Commercial application, institutional deployment for corporate donor targeting algorithms, integration into proprietary fundraising management software, or republication within commercial psychometric compilations requires explicit written permission and potential licensing agreements with the copyright holders and publishers. Inquiries regarding formal licensing should be addressed to the permissions department of Sage Publications.

12. References

• Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
• Andreoni, J. (1990). Impure altruism and donations to public goods: A theory of warm-glow giving. The Economic Journal, 100(401), 464–477. https://doi.org/10.2307/2234133
• Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. John Wiley & Sons.
• Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance. Academic Press.
• Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Addison-Wesley.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Homans, G. C. (1958). Social behavior as exchange. American Journal of Sociology, 63(6), 597–606. https://doi.org/10.1086/222355
• Webb, D. J., Green, C. L., & Brashear, T. G. (2000). Development and validation of scales to measure attitudes influencing monetary donations to charitable organizations. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 28(2), 299–309. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092070300282010

13. Items of the Scale