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Measuring experienced emotions during service recovery encounters: construction and assessment of the ESRE scale

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Abstract

The role of emotions is increasingly gaining attention as a central element in understanding customer evaluations of service failure and recovery experiences. Despite the importance of emotions for service organizations, however, empirical investigations of customers’ emotional response to service recovery encounters remain scarce. A reason for this has been the absence of a valid and reliable measurement instrument for analyzing and comparing the emotions associated with different recovery experiences. Addressing this issue, the current paper presents the development and validation of a new scale specifically designed to measure experienced emotions during service recovery encounters (ESRE). The results show that the ESRE scale is a valid and reliable instrument, which should be helpful for empirically studying the role of emotional responses to service failure and recovery encounters.

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Notes

  1. Izard’s (1977) differential emotions scale (DES), for example, overemphasizes negative feelings and is therefore unable to capture the full range of emotions (i.e., negative and positive) elicited during and/or after service recovery encounters.

  2. The practice of ad hoc measurement in the context of service recovery is well illustrated in a recent study by Chebat and Slusarczyk (2005) who measured negative emotions by two discrete emotions (anxiety and disgust) and positive feelings by joy and hope. As a rationale for choosing these specific items, the authors simply state, “[the] choice of these items has been inspired by Plutchik (1980) (p. 668)”. Moreover, at no point do the authors provide information on the reliability and validity of these ad hoc measures.

  3. For a recent attempt seeking to integrate these perspectives, see Laros et al. (2005).

  4. For informative purposes only, we also repeated the measurement development process by analyzing positive and negative emotions simultaneously (i.e., by treating their items as part of the same item pool). The results, shown in Appendix, are practically identical with those reported in the text.

  5. experienced emotions during service recovery encounters (ESRE) were defined as positive or negative feeling states arising during and/or after a complaint handling experience.

  6. They were formally trained in psychometric theory and experienced in survey development.

  7. The sample consisted of 168 students and employees (54% women and 46% men) from two large universities. Respondents ranged in age from 18 to 65+ years (mean = 27) and tended to have a university education (89%).

  8. The eight scenarios described a complaint-handling experience at a tour operator’s check-in counter in an airport following the cancellation of a flight. Scenarios were manipulated to produce high and low levels of interactional, procedural and distributive justice in the required combinations. The use of scenarios in service recovery research is a commonly accepted methodology (e.g., see Smith and Bolton 2002; Hess et al. 2003). Full versions of the specific scenarios used are available from the authors upon request.

  9. The sample consisted of 186 consumers (59% women and 41% men) who were recruited from relevant online discussion groups such as “holiday complaints”, “travel complaints” and “airline complaints”. Respondents fell into various age groups ranging from under 16 (7.6%) up to 65+ years (0.5%) and tended to have a university education (65.8%).

  10. In order to reduce recall-related distortion problems, the time frame maximum was set to six months.

  11. Using a structured-undisguised questionnaire, the scale items were personally administered to a randomly selected sample of 134 consumers (62% women and 38% men) in a major English city. Respondents fell into various age groups ranging from under 16 (1.2%) up to 65 years (7.1%) and tended to have a university education (60.3%).

  12. As a further check on discriminant validity, 95% confidence intervals of the inter-construct correlations among the different subscales were computed; none of the resulting intervals included ±1.00, providing additional support on discriminant validity.

  13. As an additional statistical check on nomological validity, the regression analyses for the final scales were repeated on the other two samples where exactly the same picture emerged, i.e., only the Type A emotions ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Discontent’ were significantly related to service recovery outcomes, with positive and negative effects, respectively. The R 2-values obtained were all also very similar to those reported in Table 3.

  14. Note, however, that stable results were obtained between the scenario-based sample and the two other samples which is undoubtedly encouraging.

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Prof. A. Parasuraman for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

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  1. Centre for Business Studies (BWZ), Chair of International Marketing, University of Vienna, Bruenner Strasse 72, 1210, Vienna, Austria

    Klaus Schoefer & Adamantios Diamantopoulos

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  1. Klaus Schoefer
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  2. Adamantios Diamantopoulos
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Correspondence to Klaus Schoefer.

Appendix

Appendix

Tables 5, 6

Table 5 Item pools for emotions expressed during service recovery encounters
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Table 6 Measurement of customer satisfaction, repurchase intentions and positive word-of-mouth
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Schoefer, K., Diamantopoulos, A. Measuring experienced emotions during service recovery encounters: construction and assessment of the ESRE scale. Service Business 2, 65–81 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11628-007-0024-0

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