A four-item scale measuring the degree of guilt a person feels in response to a specific, identifiable incident. Items capture the core phenomenology of guilt — personal responsibility, remorse, and moral self-blame — rather than a generalised negative affect state. Instructions direct respondents to a focal event specified by the researcher using a blank in the stem phrase. The scale was used in a service failure context where perceived guilt mediated the relationship between degree of co-creation and negative disconfirmation, but its item content is general enough to apply across diverse incident types. The items are common to many guilt measures, with the closest structural resemblance to the DES II (Izard, 1977). Construct reliability was .941 and AVE was .798 (Heidenreich et al., 2015), indicating strong convergent validity.
Heidenreich, S., Wittkowski, K., Handrich, M., & Falk, T. (2015). The dark side of customer co-creation: Exploring the consequences of failed co-created services. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 43(3), 279–296.
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