Reflective versus formative confusion in SEM based tourism research: A critical comment

The aim of this note is to raise awareness about the problem of measurement misspecification in tourism research with reference to studies that employ structural equations modeling. More precisely, this note describes possible instances when the measurement mode has been wrongly specified as reflective, although employed indicators/measures are formative by their nature. To assist future tourism research based on latent variable modeling, this commentary provides pragmatic advice and points to some of the key works from the wider marketing and management literature.