Variety Seeking Tendency Scale (VARSEEK)

Abstract

The Variety Seeking Tendency Scale (VARSEEK) is an eight-item, self-report psychometric instrument engineered to measure an individual’s intrinsic predisposition to seek variety in consumption choices, specifically calibrated within the domain of food and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). Developed originally by Hans C.M. van Trijp and Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp (1992) and extensively validated in consumer psychology by Van Trijp, Hoyer, and Inman (1996), the instrument operationalizes variety-seeking behavior as an internally driven, hedonic motivation to switch between alternatives for the direct purpose of stimulation, novelty, and change, rather than as a consequence of dissatisfaction, price promotions, or situational constraints. Evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Completely Disagree”) to 5 (“Completely Agree”), the scale exhibits a robust unidimensional structure confirmed across diverse international samples. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate strong internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently falling between .80 and .88, accompanied by high composite reliability. Construct validity is supported through positive correlations with generalized Optimum Stimulation Level (OSL) indices—such as the Change Seekers Index (CSI) and the Exploratory Consumer Behaviors Questionnaire (ECBQ)—while retaining strict discriminant validity from consumer innovativeness, brand involvement, and derived switching patterns. The VARSEEK scale remains a benchmark measurement tool across nutritional science, behavioral economics, and marketing science for categorizing sensory-specific satiety, portfolio diversification, and consumer food choice architecture.

Keywords

variety seeking, VARSEEK scale, consumer behavior, optimum stimulation level, brand switching, sensory-specific satiety, exploratory consumer behavior, psychometrics, food choice, consumer psychology

Authors

The principal investigators responsible for the conceptualization, psychometric formulation, and empirical testing of the VARSEEK scale are:

• Hans C.M. van Trijp, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour at Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands. His seminal research focuses on consumer decision-making, food consumption psychology, sensory perception, and the development of measurement tools capturing intrinsic motivational drivers.
• Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp, Ph.D. — C. Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An international authority on quantitative modeling, global marketing, and consumer psychometrics, including foundational work on consumer Optimum Stimulation Level (OSL) scales.
• Wayne D. Hoyer, Ph.D. — James L. Bayless/William S. Farish Chair for Free Enterprise at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. Renowned for pioneering contributions to consumer information processing, brand choice dynamics, and low-involvement decision heuristics.
• J. Jeffrey Inman, Ph.D. — Albert Wesley Frey Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean for Research at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh. Specialized in shopper insights, behavioral decision theory, in-store consumer behaviors, and category-level determinants of choice switching.

Purpose

The primary objective of the Variety Seeking Tendency Scale (VARSEEK) is to isolate and quantify an individual’s enduring trait to switch among consumption alternatives solely for the psychological reward of stimulation and change. In consumer decision-making research, brand and product switching frequently occurs due to extrinsic, non-motivational drivers—termed derived variety-seeking—such as temporary price discounts, stockouts, changing situational contexts (e.g., eating alone versus dining with guests), or multi-person household preferences. In contrast, true variety-seeking behavior (intrinsic variety seeking) is motivated by an internal need to alleviate boredom, alter sensory inputs, or explore the sensory spectrum within an otherwise acceptable set of familiar alternatives.

Prior to the introduction of VARSEEK, consumer researchers often attempted to infer variety-seeking behavior ex post from longitudinal panel scanner data or utilized overly broad general sensation-seeking scales that lacked domain-specific predictive validity. Broad exploratory scales failed to explain why a consumer might be intensely adventurous when ordering meals or snacks while demonstrating intense conservatism in financial decisions or recreational activities. The VARSEEK scale resolved this methodological limitation by providing a parsimonious, domain-specific instrument tailored to everyday consumption, primarily focusing on food and beverage environments where sensory-specific satiety and low switching costs predominate.

In research and clinical-behavioral settings, VARSEEK is applied to:

• Segment Consumer Markets: Differentiate consumers with high baselines for sensory monotony from those who require constant gustatory stimulation, aiding product development and package diversification strategies.
• Explain Dietary Diversity & Nutritional Compliance: Inform public health interventions regarding nutritional variety, selective eating, food neophobia, and adherence to balanced dietary guidelines.
• Disentangle Switching Determinants: Separate internal hedonic desires for alternation from dissatisfaction with the prior brand choice or price sensitivity in retail environments.
• Calibrate Experimental Choice Paradigms: Serve as an essential covariate in laboratory and field studies testing choice overload, multi-item assortment selection, and menu engineering.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the VARSEEK scale is intrinsic variety seeking in consumption choices. This construct reflects a stable dispositional trait characterized by an internal need for variation across repeated consumption episodes. It is conceptually grounded at the intersection of personality psychology, sensory physiology, and cognitive evaluation.

Intrinsic vs. Derived Variety Seeking

Psychometric clarity requires distinguishing between intrinsic and derived variety seeking. Derived variety seeking is transactional and circumstantial; a consumer alternates choices because a competitor is on sale, their primary brand is unavailable, or diverse tastes within a household necessitate purchasing multiple options simultaneously. Conversely, intrinsic variety seeking represents a psychological process wherein the act of switching is intrinsically reinforcing. The consumer shifts between items not because of dissatisfaction with the previous alternative, but because the utility derived from consuming the same item declines due to repetitive stimulation. VARSEEK measures this intrinsic drive.

Distinction from Consumer Innovativeness

Variety seeking is fundamentally distinct from consumer innovativeness. Innovativeness involves the promptness and eagerness with which an individual adopts novel, newly launched products or technological advancements. In contrast, variety seeking can occur entirely within a closed, well-known evoked set of mature alternatives. For example, a high variety seeker may cycle rhythmically through five conventional flavors of potato chips or soft drinks without ever adopting an entirely new product. While innovativeness focuses on novelty adoption, variety seeking focuses on alternation dynamics across familiar sensory landscapes.

Distinction from Food Neophobia and Sensation Seeking

Although VARSEEK taps into curiosity about unfamiliar foods, it is distinct from general sensation seeking (e.g., Marvin Zuckerman’s construct, which involves physical risk-taking, thrill seeking, and disinhibition). VARSEEK functions at a sub-clinical, daily hedonic level. Furthermore, it operates inversely to food neophobia (the pathological or developmental fear of novel foods). While a food neophobic individual actively rejects unfamiliar foods due to perceived danger or sensory aversion, an individual low in VARSEEK merely possesses high contentment with culinary monotony without necessarily exhibiting an anxiety-driven fear of novel foods.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the VARSEEK scale is anchored in three foundational psychological theories: Optimum Stimulation Level (OSL) theory, the concept of Sensory-Specific Satiety (SSS), and Dual-Process Hedonic Adaptation models.

1. Optimum Stimulation Level (OSL) Theory

Pioneered by psychophysiologists such as Daniel Berlyne (1960) and adapted into consumer behavior frameworks by Raju (1980) and Steenkamp and Baumgartner (1992), OSL posits that organisms maintain an internalized, homeostatic baseline of arousal. If an individual’s environmental stimulation drops below their OSL, they experience boredom and are motivated to engage in exploratory behaviors—such as novelty seeking, risk taking, or variety seeking—to elevate arousal back to the optimum. Conversely, if stimulation surpasses the OSL, the individual seeks familiar, routine environments to attenuate arousal. VARSEEK conceptualizes food variety seeking as a specific, low-risk manifestation of an individual’s attempt to restore arousal to their optimum baseline within the micro-domain of daily sustenance.

2. Sensory-Specific Satiety (SSS)

Developed by Barbara Rolls and colleagues in nutritional neuroscience, sensory-specific satiety describes the physiological and sensory phenomenon whereby the hedonic pleasure derived from a specific food declines as it is consumed, while unconsumed foods exhibiting different sensory properties (taste, texture, temperature, appearance) retain their hedonic value. Individuals vary substantially in the rate and intensity with which sensory-specific satiety manifests. High VARSEEK scorers experience accelerated sensory fatigue with repetitive sensory profiles, motivating frequent alternation across meals and snacking intervals to maintain overall gustatory pleasure.

3. Hedonic Adaptation and Curiosity Drive

The scale integrates Berlyne’s epistemic curiosity framework, suggesting that variety seeking functions via exploratory drive. Human cognitive systems adapt to constant stimuli through habituation. In food consumption, habituation reduces the emotional reward of repetitive choices. Individuals with high variety-seeking traits proactively introduce variance into daily meals and snacks to counter hedonic adaptation, actively exploring unfamiliar sensory combinations to elicit positive affective responses.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the VARSEEK scale has been extensively verified across multiple studies involving diverse consumer cohorts, retail settings, and experimental conditions.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity has been established by evaluating VARSEEK alongside validated measures of generalized exploratory behavior. Van Trijp and Steenkamp (1992) and Van Trijp et al. (1996) demonstrated strong, statistically significant positive correlations between VARSEEK scores and generalized arousal indices, such as the Change Seekers Index (CSI; $r = .45$ to $.58, p < .001$) and Raju’s (1980) Exploratory Consumer Behaviors Questionnaire (ECBQ;$r = .42$ to $.53, p < .001$). Furthermore, the scale correlates moderately with the Openness to Experience domain of the Five-Factor Model ($r = .34$ to $.41$).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established through confirmatory factor models demonstrating that VARSEEK represents an empirical construct distinct from related consumer traits:

• Brand Involvement: VARSEEK shows near-zero or non-significant correlations with category involvement ($r = -.08$ to $.11$), demonstrating that an individual’s desire for variety does not depend on whether they view the product category as personally critical or important.
• Price Sensitivity: Correlations with deal-proneness and price consciousness remain negligible ($r < .12$), proving that high scorers do not alternate items simply because of promotional price cuts.
• Consumer Innovativeness: While related ($r pprox .30$), multi-trait multi-method (MTMM) analyses and average variance extracted (AVE) versus shared variance criteria (Fornell-Larcker test) confirm that variety seeking remains structurally separate from innovativeness scales.

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

The ultimate criterion for VARSEEK lies in its capacity to predict actual choice switching in naturalistic and controlled environments:

• Longitudinal Scanner Panel Data: In the seminal study by Van Trijp, Hoyer, and Inman (1996), VARSEEK scores were matched with actual household supermarket scanner data across several product categories (margarine, coffee, beer, cookies). High VARSEEK individuals demonstrated significantly higher brand-switching rates driven purely by internal alternation rather than price promotions or coupon redemption.
• In-Lab Behavioral Selection: When participants are invited to choose multi-pack selections of foods or beverages for future consumption, high VARSEEK scorers systematically select broader, more heterogeneous assortments than low scorers, who repeatedly choose identical items.

Reliability

The internal consistency and temporal stability of the VARSEEK scale have demonstrated strong performance across Dutch, American, British, and wider European consumer samples.

Internal Consistency

Across validation studies, the eight-item VARSEEK scale demonstrates high internal reliability:

• In the original formulation studies by Van Trijp and Steenkamp (1992), Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) was reported at .88 in a representative national consumer sample ($N = 734$).
• In the cross-category validation study by Van Trijp, Hoyer, and Inman (1996), alpha coefficients ranged from .82 to .87 across different consumer sub-samples.
• Subsequent cross-cultural applications evaluating dietary behavior across European cohorts (e.g., Belgium, Norway, Spain) have confirmed homogeneous internal consistency, with alpha values consistently maintaining thresholds between .80 and .86, and composite reliability ($CR$) exceeding .85.
• Corrected item-total correlations across the eight items consistently range between .48 and .72, confirming that all items contribute reliably to the central construct.

Test-Retest Stability

Evaluations assessing test-retest reliability over four- to six-week intervals have yielded intraclass correlation coefficients ($ICC$) between .76 and .82, demonstrating that while consumption episodes fluctuate situationally, the underlying variety-seeking trait remains stable over time.

Factor Analysis

Extensive exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses validate the unidimensional factor structure of the VARSEEK instrument.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal components and maximum likelihood exploratory factor analyses (with both varimax and oblimin rotations) performed by Van Trijp and Steenkamp revealed a single dominant eigenvalue substantially exceeding the Kaiser criterion (eigenvalue 1 > 3.8), accounting for over 50% to 58% of the total variance. Subsequent eigenvalues dropped precipitously below 0.85, generating an unambiguous scree plot elbow that decisively substantiates a unidimensional construct.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirm strong goodness-of-fit indices for the single-factor model across multiple empirical investigations. Representative fit indices reported across standard validation studies include:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom ($\chi^2/df$): 1.84 to 2.45 (well below the conservative threshold of 3.0).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .96 to .98.
• Goodness-of-Fit Index (GFI): .95 to .97.
• Adjusted Goodness-of-Fit Index (AGFI): .93 to .95.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .042 to .058 (indicating close model fit, with 90% confidence intervals below .07).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .035 to .044.

Factor Loadings

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) across the eight indicators are uniformly robust, ranging from .55 to .83:

• Item 1: $lambda pprox .62 – .71$
• Item 2: $lambda pprox .58 – .68$
• Item 3: $lambda pprox .55 – .66$ (Reverse scored)
• Item 4: $lambda pprox .68 – .78$ (Reverse scored)
• Item 5: $lambda pprox .72 – .81$
• Item 6: $lambda pprox .75 – .83$
• Item 7: $lambda pprox .69 – .79$
• Item 8: $lambda pprox .71 – .80$

Measurement invariance testing across gender and age strata supports full configural and metric invariance, and partial scalar invariance, enabling comparative research across demographic cohorts.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Variety Seeking Tendency Scale (VARSEEK)
• Instrument Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale
• Primary Application: Consumer psychology, sensory analysis, food choice research, behavioral economics
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), or web-based online survey
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (ages 16 and above)
• Item Count: 8 items
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale (1 = Completely Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neither Agree nor Disagree, 4 = Agree, 5 = Completely Agree)
• Direction of Scoring: Higher total scores denote a stronger intrinsic variety-seeking tendency in food consumption choices.
• Reverse-Scored Items: Items 3 and 4 must be reversed prior to computing sum or average scores ($1
  ightarrow 5, 2
  ightarrow 4, 3
  ightarrow 3, 4
  ightarrow 2, 5
  ightarrow 1$).
• Score Calculation:
  • Summed Score Range: 8 to 40 points.
  • Mean Index Range: 1.0 to 5.0 (calculated by dividing the total sum of responses by 8).
• Normative Benchmarks (Indicative Consumer Samples):
  • Low Variety Seeking: Mean score < 2.80 (Sum < 22.4)
  • Moderate Variety Seeking: Mean score 2.80 to 3.60 (Sum 22.4 to 28.8)
  • High Variety Seeking: Mean score > 3.60 (Sum > 28.8)

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Initial Publication: 1992 (Original Dutch validation by Hans C.M. van Trijp & Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp); 1996 (Peer-reviewed English marketing validation by Hans C.M. van Trijp, Wayne D. Hoyer, & J. Jeffrey Inman in the Journal of Marketing Research).
• Intellectual Property & Permissions: The VARSEEK scale was developed for academic investigation and is published within academic journal literature. Under fair use principles in scientific inquiry, it may be utilized by non-commercial academic researchers without royalty fees or formal written permission, provided appropriate bibliographic attribution is given to the authors and original publications.
• Commercial Applications: Commercial market research firms or enterprise organizations deploying the instrument within proprietary testing batteries should reference the copyright guidelines of the publishing entity (American Marketing Association) and contact the authors regarding custom implementations.

References

• Berlyne, D. E. (1960). Conflict, arousal, and curiosity. McGraw-Hill. https://doi.org/10.1037/11164-000
• Raju, P. S. (1980). Optimum stimulation level: Its relationship to personality, demographics, and exploratory behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 7(3), 272–282. https://doi.org/10.1086/208815
• Rolls, B. J., Rolls, E. T., Rowe, E. A., & Sweeney, K. (1981). Sensory specific satiety in man. Physiology & Behavior, 27(1), 137–142. https://doi.org/10.1016/0031-9384(81)90310-3
• Steenkamp, J.-B. E. M., & Baumgartner, H. (1992). The role of optimum stimulation level in exploratory consumer behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 19(3), 434–448. https://doi.org/10.1086/209313
• Van Trijp, H. C. M. (1995). Variety-seeking in product choice behavior: Theory with applications in the food domain. Wageningen Agricultural University.
• Van Trijp, H. C. M., Hoyer, W. D., & Inman, J. J. (1996). Why switch? Product category–level explanations for true variety-seeking behavior. Journal of Marketing Research, 33(3), 281–292. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224379603300304
• Van Trijp, H. C. M., & Steenkamp, J.-B. E. M. (1992). Consumers’ variety seeking tendency with respect to foods: Measurement and managerial implications. Research on Marketing for the 1990s (Proceedings of the 21st EMAC Conference), 1183–1198.

Items of the Scale