The service sector of the global economy is undoubtedly growing and increasingly highlighting
the criticality of service quality to enhanced profitability in most service organisations. The
demand for accountability from different stakeholders, including clients, has also made service
quality a highly debated, researched and most powerful competitive trend shaping marketing
and business strategy. Developing reliable measurement instruments of service quality and
strategies for the improvement of service quality invariably become the most important
responsibilities for managers in many organisations.
In the absence of conceptual clarity on service quality, divergent views on the dimensionality of
service quality and the lack of a psychometrically valid service quality measure in archival
institutions, this study set out to develop and subsequently validate a measurement instrument
to assess service quality in an archival institutional setting.
The two research questions investigated in this study were: (1) what are the dimensions for
measuring service quality in archival institutions, and (2) how can the dimensions of service
quality in archival institutions be measured effectively. The methodology for this study involved
a two-phased qualitative and quantitative analysis addressing these two research questions.
The study followed the standard psychometric procedure for developing constructs.
This research has resulted in the important findings and relevant conclusions for both
academics and practitioners interested in service quality in the archival environment. The
service quality measurement instrument formulated is called ARCHIVqual and has three
dimensions, namely (1) security of information (with 4 items), (2) integrity of information (with
3 items) and (3) usability of information (with 2 items).
Besides measuring service quality in the archival environment, ARCHIVqual will also serve as a
tool for conducting periodic surveys thereby identifying specific problematic areas in archival
institutions. / Graduate School for Business Leadership / DBL
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/5758 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Sibanda, Rosemary |
| Contributors | Serumaga-Zake, P. A. E. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (xviii, 255 leaves) |
Page generated in 0.0018 seconds