Validation of the ISS-QUAL and the role of gender, age and education on it service quality in the public sector

Abstract

Public organizations have invested heavily in information technology (IT) and have created internal specialized IT services departments which must be managed from the perspective of the provision of services. The people involved in these organizations can be grouped by demographic characteristics such as gender, age and level of formal education. Thus, the study has two objectives. The first is to test, in the context of the public sector, the validity of the ISS-QUAL, a new scale developed to measure the IT service quality provided by internal IT departments. The second objective is to analyze the role of the variables of gender, age and the level of education of public servants on the perception of IT service quality provided by internal departments. For this purpose, we used structural equation modeling to perform a confirmatory factorial analysis with a sample of 879 IT users, as well as to identify the role of gender, age and level of users’ formal education on perceived service quality. The results confirm the validity and the high explanatory power of the ISS-QUAL within the scope of public organizations, and indicate that the demographic characteristics of public servants differentially affect service quality factors. The study presents the implications of the results for researchers in the field and for managers of internal IT departments in the public sector.