This article acknowledges the critical role of scale develop- ment in the historical development of the sport management discipline and presents a contingency framework of five-step scale development process based on the classical testing para- digm. We argue that the process of scale development should be contingent on three origins of the construct: (a) the construct is adopted from the existing literature (Type I); (b) the construct is adapted based on the specific research context (Type II); and (c) the construct is invented from observations (Type III). Each step and how it relates to validation is then discussed in details.