Three items assess how much a customer engaged in negative word-of-mouth following a specific shopping experience, including complaints about employees directed at others, and negative comments about the experience shared with friends and relatives. The items measure past behaviour (what the respondent did) rather than future intention, making this a post-experience behavioural measure of complaint propagation through social networks.
Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.
Created by Ashley and Noble (2014) by adapting concepts from a scale by McColl-Kennedy et al. (2009) which measured similar complaint-related behaviours in a service failure context. Item phrasing confirmed as past-tense behavioural reports. The five-point Likert-type response format was confirmed via personal correspondence (Noble 2015). The scale was used in Study 4 in the context of customers reacting to territorial employee behaviour in a retail setting. AVE of .71 exceeds the .50 threshold. Items 1 and 2 are closely related (both involve complaining about employees/experience), and item 3 adds a nuance by targeting friends/relatives specifically as recipients, excluding those living at home. The exclusion of household members in item 3 should be noted when assessing discriminant validity from measures of complaint behaviour directed at in-home others. Reliability reported as composite reliability (CR/ω) rather than Cronbach's α; the value entered in the alpha field reflects CR. CR and omega are computed from the same formula using CFA factor loadings and are treated as equivalent here.
Ashley, C., & Noble, S. M. (2014). It's closing time: Territorial behaviors from customers in response to front line employees. Journal of Retailing, 90(1), 74-92.
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