Three bipolar semantic differential adjectives tap a consumer's holistic evaluative response to a defined service encounter -- ranging from negative to positive, unappealing to appealing, and bad to good. Because the format is semantic differential rather than Likert-type, the scale captures a gestalt affective impression rather than cognitive agreement with specific service quality propositions. The scale was developed for laboratory simulations of service encounters and validated by its strong correlation with an established external service evaluation benchmark.
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Items were drawn from attitude measures used by Miniard, Sirdeshmukh, and Innis (1992). The instructions direct participants to imagine they actually experienced the scenario described. A focal aspect or encounter name should be placed in the blank within the instruction stem (e.g., 'your experience during check-out'). Reliability (.986) was derived from Study 2 data and reported via personal correspondence with the corresponding author; it was not reported in the original article. The extremely high alpha suggests the three adjectives tap a single evaluative dimension with little residual variance, consistent with the semantic differential format. The 9-point response range affords considerable sensitivity for detecting fine-grained differences in encounter impressions.
Giebelhausen, M., Robinson, S. G., Sirianni, N. J., & Brady, M. K. (2014). Touch versus tech: When technology functions as a barrier or a benefit to service encounters. Journal of Marketing, 78(4), 113-124.
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