A Psychometric Assessment of E-S-Qual: A Scale to Measure Electronic Service Quality

The results revealed that the E-S-QUAL scale is effective in capturing the essence of electronic service quality, but that both scholars and practitioners must assess the underlying factor structure of their data before drawing any conclusions from their study.

Abstract

As the Internet retailing market grows at an inceasing rate, those who use the Internet as a retailing channel have realised that service delivery and service quality are as important for the Internet environment as for the bricks-and-mortar environment. The absence of a valid and reliable instrument to measure service quality in this new environment has, however, bedeviled the endeavors of both scholars and practitioners to effectively measure and thus manage service-quality strategies. The first scale developed that effectively captured the nature of electronic service quality from the perspective of online shopping through a retail Website was the E-S-QUAL scale. The objective of this study was to subject the E-S-QUAL scale to a psychometric assessment. The results revealed that the scale is effective in capturing the essence of electronic service quality, but that both scholars and practitioners must assess the underlying factor structure of their data before drawing any conclusions from their study. For this particular data set, a six-factor configuration proved to be superior to the four-factor configuration originally proposed. Several ways in which the data can be analyzed are demonstrated, and suggestions for additional scale development and refinement are offered.