Reflections on Perceived Online Service Quality:Structure, Antecedents, Ontology, Theory andMeasurement

摘要

Online services are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and this growth has beenaccompanied by increased business interest in measuring and managing onlineservice quality. This interest is also reflected in a large number of academic studies.Despite this, there is very little consensus about the dimensions and antecedents ofperceived online service quality (POLSQ).We consider two possible reasons for this: first that the phenomenon of online servicequality is changing as new technology affordances arise, so instability in thedimensionality would be a result of changes in the underlying phenomenon. Second,the theoretical approach and assumptions that studies of online service quality areusually founded on is flawed.My research questions are: 1) what is the structure of perceived online servicequality? 2) What are the antecedents of perceived online service quality? 3) What isthe ontology of perceived online service quality? 4) What are the most appropriatemodelling and measurement methods for measuring online service qualityquantitatively, and what insights can be gained from psychometrics?5) What insightsdoes this offer IS researchers for the measurement of user attitudes and perceptionstowards technologies?We find that leading models and instruments tend to be based on exploratory factoranalysis and have not been informed by advances in measurement theory, particularlyco-variance-based structural equation models, and a sub-set of those models knownas multi-indicator structural models.We apply recent advances in measurement theory to a dataset. We apply and comparefour different modelling methods, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factoranalysis, formative models, and multi-indicator structural models, and discuss thetheoretical foundations of each method.We conclude that POLSQ may not have a separate ontology as a multi-dimensionalconstruct, but overall affect towards the service quality of a website is likely to be theresult of the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived trust towardsthe service. This finding supports the explanatory power of information systemstheories over marketing and consumer behaviour theories when studying thisphenomenon. We find that user's perceptions of detailed affordances of the service,such as the relevance and timeliness of the information are antecedent to overallaffect towards the service, rather than being additional dimensions of POLSQ.We find that widely used techniques such as exploratory factor analysis have seriousdrawbacks. We find that multi-indicator structural models provide an accurate andnuanced method for modelling the formation of attitudes and perceptions towardstechnology, which is also well-grounded in theory from social psychology.Finally, we suggest that the approach we take to measuring POLSQ is has potentialvalue for other research which aims to measure customer attitudes and perceptionstowards technologies.