Abstract

This study examines the adaptation of a Marketing instrument, SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, Berry, & Zeithaml, 1991a), to gauge empirically the attitudes of residents towards the quality of municipal services. SERVQUAL comprises two batteries of items, one for expectations and one for perceptions, and posits that there are five dimensions to the quality construct. The aims of this study are (a) to develop a reliable and valid instrument to determine the quality of municipal services as perceived by residents, (b) to assess the relative importance of the dimensions in the shaping of the quality construct, (c) to develop a reliable and valid instrument to measure residents' satisfaction with the services provided by a municipal government, and (d) to study the relationship between measures of satisfaction and quality of service offered by that municipality. A mail survey was conducted on a representative sample of the population of a town in Western Quebec. Several findings have emerged from the data analysis. First, the quality construct can be structured hierarchically as a second-order factor model. Second, the importance weights that the residents assign to the dimensions for the expectations are not the same as those for the perceptions. Third, perceptions alone are sufficient to explain the shaping of satisfaction. Hence, this study has successfully resolved some of the outstanding issues concerning the scales, but has raised new issues about their use in the municipal context.