Methods of Measuring Health-Care Service Quality

Abstract

Service quality is an elusive and abstract construct to measure, and extra effort is required to establish a valid measure. This study investigates the psychometric properties of three different measurements of health-care service quality as assessed by physicians. The multitrait-multimethod approach revealed that convergent validity was established for measures based on the single-item global rating method and multi-item rating method. On the other hand, almost no evidence of convergent validity was found for the measures based on the constant-sum rating method. Furthermore, discriminant validity for the seven health-care service quality dimensions measured by the three methods was not well established. The high levels of interdimensional correlations found suggested that the service quality dimensions may not be separable in a practical sense. The study suggested an ongoing effort is needed to develop a new service quality scale suitable to this unique service industry.