A Review and Analysis of the Policy-Capturing Methodology in Organizational Research: Guidelines for Research and Practice

Policy-capturing has been employed extensively in the past to examine how organizational decision makers use the information available to them when making evaluative judgments. The purpose of this article is to provide researchers with guidelines for enhancing the reliability and validity of their studies. More specifically, the authors identify issues researchers may want to consider when designing such studies and offer suggestions for effectively addressing them. They draw on a review of 37 articles from 5 major journals to identify “best practice” and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of alternative approaches to resolving the various issues. The key issues are (a) the realism of the approach and its effect on both internal and external validity, (b) the limits of the full factorial design, (c) the need for orthogonal cues, (d) sample size and statistical power, and (e) the assessment of reliability. The analysis also includes comparisons with conjoint analysis, a similar methodology used in the marketing research literature.