A reassessment of the dimensionality of retail performance: a multivariate generalizability theory perspective

Abstract

With the focus on performance assessment, a considerable amount of academic work has been devoted to customer assessment of retail stores. A disproportionate share of attention has been devoted to the reproducibility of SERVQUAL dimensions in studies of the variability across customers. More recently attention has shifted to a broader perspective on customer assessment of retail service performance, with Rust and Oliver (in: Rust and Oliver (Eds.), Service Quality: New Directions in Theory and Practice. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1994, pp. 1–19) providing a framework where the three distinct elements are the service product, the service environment, and the service delivery process. However, variability across other sources of performance variation, such as retail stores, has rarely been considered when studying the dimensionality of retail performance. In this paper, we use multivariate generalizability theory to assess the dimensionality of measures of retail store performance data both across stores and across shoppers.