Discussion of the Measurement Invariance Across Gender in the Version of the Part of Responsiveness in Servqual Scale

This quantitative research was to examine the measurement invariance across gender for the part of Responsiveness in SERVQUAL Scale for retail chain stores business in Taiwan. The SERVQUAL Scale has become the most common questionnaire for investigating the perception of service quality in current service industry. However, the measurement invariance issue across groups in SERVQUA only received very few considerations. Previous studies also revealed there was the significant relationship between gender and service quality. The participants in this research were selected as customers from four retail chain stores in Taiwan, resulting in 200 individual surveys for analysis. The outcomes indicated the Taiwan version of Responsiveness 5-item scale achieved strict measurement invariance across gender. The property of factor loading, structural covariances and measurement residuals across gender were invariant. Finally, this research generated the recommendations for retail chain stores business in Taiwan and suggested future scholar studies. Keywords—service quality, SERVQUAL, responsiveness, measurement invariance, retail chain stores, Taiwan I. RESEARCH BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW The most prominent questionnaire for measuring service quality – SERVQUAL Scales was created by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry [1]. The SERVQUAL Scales provided five dimensions to measure the service quality, such as tangible, responsiveness, reliability, empathy, and assurance. Service quality has been described as the critical factor to sustain the proficiency for company development. Even though this questionnaire has applied broadly to perform studies for service quality in industries or countries, only some studies have examined the issues of the measurement invariance for SERVQUAL Scale. In addition, numerous researchers (Baird [2], Blustain [3], Canary and Hause [4]) have suggested theories for gender difference in numerous facets on psychology and manner, such as social talents, communications, work approaches and so on. People also pay much attention on the issue of the increasing woman buying power for those years, and the studies for gender differences in consumer behavior have become important topic for current academy researcher and marketing administrators in business. Research by Meyers-Levy and Maheswarm [5], and Mitchell and Walsh [6] revealed gender difference will lead to different buyer behavior. Mitchell and Walsh [6] also claimed gender differences resulted in different decision making process. These theories and studies suggested that there is the significant relationship between gender and service quality. Therefore, this research expanded previous research and applied SEM approach to evaluate the measurement invariance across gender for the component of Responsiveness in SERVQUAL Scale in retail chain stores business of Taiwan. II. RESEARCH PURPOSES AND HYPOTHESES Based on the previous studies and theories, the purposes and the significance for this research were: (a) to examine the measurement invariance across gender for the part of Responsiveness in SERVQUAL Scale in retail chain stores business of Taiwan, (b) to have the recommendations for managerial application of retail chain stores business, and (c) to identify areas for future scholarly inquiry. Byrne [7] suggested the tests for multigroup invariance are: (a) factor loadings, (b) factor covariances, and (c) structural regression paths. Following this concept, the researcher proposed three hypotheses as follows. Jöreskog [8] recommended the first step to measure the equality of covariance structure are the test of null hypothesis. The groups were considered to have equivalent covariance structures if H 0 cannot be rejected. Following these concept, the researcher proposed three null hypotheses as follows: Hypothesis 1: The measurement weights for 5 items are invariant across gender. , Hypothesis 2: International Conference of Organizational Innovation (ICOI 2017) Copyright © 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Intelligent Systems Research, volume 131