DEVELOPMENT OF SCALES TO MEASURE CUSTOMERS’ WILLINGNESS TO HAVE CONTROL AND THE CONTROL OFFERED BY SERVICE BUSINESSES

Abstract

This study offers two new scales to be used by services marketing and management practitioners and academics.  The scales measure how much control a service customer prefers to have and how much control a service business offers in order to reduce or eliminate various types of risks.  Scales measure overall control required by a customer and the control offered by a service business based on the measurement of three types/dimensions of control (cognitive, behavioural and decisional). For the customer control scale data were collected from 384 service customers and for the service business control scale data were collected from 210 service customers. The internal consistency, discriminant validity, and convergent validity of each scale were assessed by means of item-total correlations, Cronbach's alpha, and comparison with other questionnaire items. Both of the control scales developed appear to have strong reliability and validity