EMERGING TRENDS AND CONCLUSIONS:THE SERVQUAL INSTRUMENT

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THE SERVQUAL INSTRUMENT

The SERVQUAL instrument for measuring service quality has evolved into a kind of gospel for academics and practitioners in the field of service quality. With the 10 dimensions in Table 1 as a starting point, 97 items were generated (Parasuraman et al. 1988). Each item consisted of two com- ponents: one component reflected perceived service or perceptions and the other component reflected expected service or expectations. Both components were measured on seven-point Likert scale with only the ends of scale anchored by ‘‘Strongly disagree’’ (1) and ‘‘Strongly agree’’ (7). The items were presented in a two consecutive parts. The first part contained the expectation components for the items, while the second part contained the perception components for the items. In order to prevent distortion of the responses by acquiescence bias or ‘‘yea-saying or nay-saying’’ tendencies, about half of the items were negatively worded and the other half positively worded—reverse state- ment polarization.

Two stages of data collection and scale purification were subsequently carried out. The first stage of data collection and scale purification, using coefficient a, item-to-total correlations and principal components analysis, resulted in a reduction of the number of factors to seven. Five of the original factors were retained in this configuration (see Table 1): (1) tangibles, (2) reliability, (3) responsive- ness, (4) understanding / knowing the customer, and (5) access. The remaining five dimensions (com- munication, credibility, security, competence and courtesy), were collapsed into two dimensions. The number of factors was further reduced in the second stage of data collection and scale purification. The results of principal components analysis suggested an overlap between the dimensions understanding / knowing the customer and access and the dimensions communication, credibility, se- curity, competence and courtesy. Consequently, the overlapping dimensions were combined to form two separate dimensions: (1) assurance and (2) empathy.

Parasuraman et al. (1991) present a replication and extension of their 1988 study. In particular, they propose a number of modifications to the original SERVQUAL instrument (Parasuraman et al. 1988). The first modification is concerned with the expectations section of SERVQUAL. Confronted with extremely high scores on the expectations components of the individual statements, Parasuraman et al. (1991) decided to revise the expectation part of the instrument. Whereas the original scale reflected normative or ideal expectations, the revised instrument reflected predictive expectations relative to an excellent firm in the industry. For example, with regard to statement no. 5, the expec- tation item (E5) of the original instrument is formulated as follows: ‘‘When these firms promise to do something by a certain time, they should do so’’ (Parasuraman et al. 1988, p. 38). In the revised SERVQUAL instrument, the wording of expectation item no. 5 (E5) has been changed to ‘‘When excellent telephone companies promise to do something by a certain time, they will do so’’ (Para- suraman et al. 1991, p. 446).

A second modification related to the use of negatively worded items for the responsiveness and empathy dimensions in the original instrument. For the modified instrument, all negatively worded items were replaced by positively worded items. Moreover, in their 1991 study, Parasuraman and his colleagues suggest adding an importance measure to instrument in order to be able to calculate ‘‘a composite, weighted estimate of overall service quality’’ (Parasuraman et al. 1991, p. 424). Parasur- aman et al. (1991) propose that importance should be measured by allocating 100 points to the individual dimensions of service quality in accordance with their perceived importance.

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