Some Problems When Adopting Churchill's Paradigm for the Development of Service Quality Measurement Scales

Abstract

Since the 1970s, marketing academics have sought to establish the reliability and validity of measures of marketing constructs. In 1979, Churchill described a paradigm that would aid researchers in the development of such measures. There are, however, many problems involved in the adoption of Churchill's framework. Some are endemic to the paradigm itself; whereas, others arise through researchers' adaptations of the recommended stages. A more recent adaptation has been the development of the well-known measure of service quality — SERVQUAL Parasuraman et al. 1988, Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry 1994b, Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry 1994c. (Parasuraman, Berry, and Zeithaml, 1991). With reference to that scale's development and a study that assessed a number of measures for the evaluation of family-planning services, this paper illustrates that the criteria for establishing reliability and validity may be more indicative of measurement error than of evidence that the scale is an effective measure of the underlying construct.