Consumers’ Preferences for Ethical Entertainment Consumption: Conceptualization, Development, and Validation of a Scale

Abstract Our study describes the conceptualization, development, and validation of a reliable scale to measure the Consumers’ Preferences for Ethical Entertainment Consumption (CPEEC) in the context of OTT platforms. Past literature has addressed Ethical Consumption in various contexts that hold significant importance among consumers. However, there is limited literature on the Ethical Consumption in the domain of OTT entertainment, which is a new and burgeoning field of literature. Conceptualizing and developing a measurement scale for CPEEC will help measure the ethicality of entertainment like films, web shows and reality shows. The CPEEC scale is developed and validated by performing 33 in-depth interviews, focus group discussions with 20 participants, and three online surveys with 707 respondents. Our findings highlight that the CPEEC construct is a formative second-order construct that consists of three first-order dimensions. Entertainment executives can use the CPEEC scale to strategize their existing and new content catalogs according to consumer values and beliefs.