From the Editor

Abstract

Announcing a New Section in JCR : Re-Inquiries About 18 months ago I was invited to write a concise response from an editor's perspective (Mick 2000) on a then-forthcoming article (Hubbard and Ryan 2000) in Educational and Psychological Measurement . The authors—like others long before them (e.g., Bakan 1966; Meehl 1978)—criticized the overemphasis on statistical significance testing for establishing the soundness or validity of knowledge claims emanating from empirical quantitative research. To rectify this practice, Hubbard and Ryan made a strong appeal for more replication-oriented research. This is also another déjà vu, being the same advice offered for years by social scientists (e.g., Cohen 1994; Morrison and Henkel 1970), including marketing and consumer researchers (e.g., Farley, Lehmann, and Mann 1998; Monroe 1992a, 1992b; Sawyer and Peter 1983; Winer 1999). But it has remained largely unheeded. To be sure, philosophy of science generally, and replication-oriented research specifically, are complex and controversial issues in a multiparadigmatic, multidisciplinary field such as ours. Notwithstanding, as I mulled over recent appeals to leading journals to establish sections dedicated to replication-oriented research (e.g., Hubbard and Ryan 2000; Robinson and Levin 1997), I became convinced that JCR should do much more to encourage research ventures and dialogues that examine the robustness of key conceptual and substantive insights that our field maintains about consumer behavior. By robustness I refer to a collection of interrelated issues regarding the integrity, verisimilitude, and transferability (or generalizability) of knowledge claims. To examine robustness implies, in the very broadest sense, to re-inquire. And by “re-inquire,” I mean to re-think, re-test, re-interpret, re-analyze, or re-present—the objects of which are the theories, frameworks, themes, data, findings, and methodologies generated in prior scholarship. As such, there is an irony to concede that we have not done much re-inquiry despite the fact—as Kent Monroe aptly noted to me—the very name of our field and this journal is consumer re-search .