Service Quality Assessment Scale (SQAS): An Instrument for Evaluating Service Quality of Health Fitness Clubs
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CONTRIBUTORS:
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CONFERENCE NAME:
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CONF. LOCATION:
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None
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CONFERENCE YEAR:
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2001
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PUB TYPE:
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Conference Presentation
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SUBJECT(S):
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Service Quality, Scale, Assessment, Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis
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DISCIPLINE:
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Statistics
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HTTP:
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LANGUAGE:
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English
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PUB ID:
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103-368-187
(Last edited on
2003/02/11 09:39:06 US/Mountain)
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SPONSOR(S):
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ABSTRACT:
Numerous researchers have indicated that service quality may be a key factor affecting customer satisfaction, consumption behavior, and even exercise adherence of health-fitness club members. However, a limited number of studies have been conducted to provide specific information for health club administration, which in part may have been due to the lack of an instrument with good measurement properties and practical application values. This study was designed to develop the Service Quality Assessment Scale (SQAS) to evaluate customer perception and satisfaction toward service and program quality of health-fitness clubs through four phases: (a) formulation of the preliminary scale, (b) a pilot study, (c) test administration and exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and (4) confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The preliminary scale with 46 items in Likert 7-scale was formulated through a serious of steps, including review of literature, interviewing a panel of seven experts, a focus group of five health club administrators or members, interviewing 15 health club members, on-site observations, and test of content validity by the panel of experts. For the pilot study, a sample of health club members (N=234) responded to the preliminary scale. Conducting an EFA with alpha extraction and promax rotation, six factors ('Staff', 'Program', 'Locker Room', 'Physical Facility', 'Workout Facility', and 'Child Care') with 42 items were determined when using an eigenvalue equal to or greater than 1.0 and a factor loading equal to or greater than .40 without double loading as criteria. For the third and fourth phases, members of 10 health-fitness clubs (N=1,202) responded to the revised scale. The data set was randomly split into two halves. EFA was conducted on the first half sample. Same six factors emerged with a total of 61.34% variance explanation and alpha reliability ranged from .84 to .94 for the factors. Using the second half sample, a CFA was conducted to examine a five-factor model. The factor ‘Child Care’ was excluded from the model because not all of the health clubs provided this service. Maximum likelihood method was used since various researchers have indicated its robustness when there are minor violations of the normality assumption in the data. The chi-square statistics of the model was significant (i.e., c2 = 2,202.80, p < .01); yet, the goodness-of-fit indexes were within tolerable ranges (e.g., GFI = .81, CFI = .89). To improve the model, items with the lowest lambda values were gradually eliminated. Eventually, a five-factor model with 20 items was generated: 'Staff' (6 items), 'Program' (4 items), 'Locker Room' (4 items), 'Physical Facility' (3 items), and 'Workout Facility' (3 items). The fit indexes revealed that the model provided an adequate fit to the data (e.g., GFI = .91, CFI = .95). The model was also found to have a significantly (p < .05) better fit when compared to other four nested models. Using Weighted Least Squares method, all the fit indexes of the model were found to be superior (e.g., RMSEA = .049, GFI = .98, CFI = .98). This further confirmed that the SQAS was robust and had sound psychometric property. Discussions were focused on the measurement properties of the scale and its application potential to enhance health-fitness club administration.
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