Examining Individual Differences in Interpersonal Influence: On the Psychometric Properties of the Generalized Opinion Leadership Scale (GOLS)

Abstract

Opinion leadership describes an individual's tendency to informally influence others’ attitudes and overt behaviors. In contrast to contemporary views of opinion leadership as a highly domain-specific trait, this paper introduces a multi-faceted personality trait, generalized opinion leadership (GOL) that characterizes exceptionally influential individuals independent of a specific subject area. Two studies report on the psychometric properties of a scale to assess GOL. Study 1 is based on three independent samples (N = 1,575, N = 1,275, and N = 231) and demonstrates the factorial structure of the instrument and its measurement invariance across sex, age, and educational levels. Study 2 (N = 310) analyzes multitrait-multiinformant data to highlight the scale's discriminant validity with regard to innovativeness and trendsetting.

Keywords:

• measurement invariance
• multitrait-multimethod analysis
• personality
• social influence

Author Notes

Bernad Batinic is professor of work, organizational, and media psychology at the University of Linz, Austria. His research focuses on work psychology, job satisfaction, opinion leadership, new media, and also (online) research methods. Markus Appel (Dr. phil.) is a professor at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. His research is focused on communication and media. Timo Gnambs is an assistant professor at Osnabrück University, Germany. His current research interests are personality measurement, including computer-adaptive and web-based assessments, individual differences in social influence, and meta-analytic methods.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Anja Wiesner for her comments on an early draft of this manuscript. An analysis of the representative sample in Study 1 with a technical focus has been also presented in Gnambs and Batinic (2011b). However, none of the analyses presented in this paper have been previously published.