Some problems when adopting Churchill's paradigm for the development of service quality measurement scales

Since the 1970s, marketing academics have sought to establish the reliability and validity of measure of marketing consrtucts. 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 paratigm itself whereas, others arise through researchers' adaptations of the recommended stages. A more recent adaptation has bern the development qi the well-known measure of service quanlity - SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry, 1988; 1994b, c). (Parasuraman, Berry, and Zeithaml, 1991). With reference to that scale's development and a study that assessed a numher of measures for the evaluation of family-planning services, this paper illustrates that the criteria for establishing reliability and validity may be move indicative of measurement error than of evidence that the scale is an effective measure of the underlying constuct. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.