Be Our Guest: The Development of the Interpersonal Hospitality Scale

Abstract

Despite the ubiquity of hosting others in one’s home, no validated measure of domestic hospitality currently exists. To address this gap, the current paper presents a set of four studies that develop and validate the Interpersonal Hospitality Scale, which seeks to capture the affective, motivational, and behavioral components of this person-place construct. The 12-item scale assesses three core dimensions: responsibility for guests, welcomingness, and a lack of perceived imposition. The analyses reported here provide support for the psychometric adequacy of this new scale, demonstrating strong internal reliability and a consistent factor structure. Moreover, this trait was found to be a unique predictor of several theoretically related constructs, including one’s desired home ambiance, attitudes toward immigration, and willingness/likelihood of hosting others in need. This scale offers a much-needed means of measuring one important aspect of how people conceptualize their home environment relative to others.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at https://osf.io/9j28y/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data through Open Practices Disclosure. The data are openly accessible at https://osf.io/9j28y/. To obtain the author's disclosure form, please contact the Editor.

Notes

1 Additional exploratory bifactor models were also tested, but all 2-factor variations showed poor fit.