The managerial objective of the sport facility consists in improving consumers quality of living. In other words, it means promoting the consumers material benefit by improving the service quality of the public sport facility and satisfying consumers...
The managerial objective of the sport facility consists in improving consumers quality of living. In other words, it means promoting the consumers material benefit by improving the service quality of the public sport facility and satisfying consumers needs. Therefore, the management of the public sport facility should grasp the consumers needs, provide the consumer with the service capable of satisfying them, and practice consumer-oriented management.
Doing so requires the management of the sport facility to grasp the quality of service provided by the sport facility by assessing the service quality felt by the consumer and to improve competitiveness between sport facilities by reflecting it in the operation of the public sport facility.
Therefore, this study is intended to develop the measuring device service quality for the public sport facility through an inquiry into the literature or existing service quality scale and to analyze the measured service quality. For this purpose, an attempt was made to attain the purpose of this study through the following three concrete procedures:
Firstly, the literature is inquired into on existing service quality scale and then the theoretical analysis is made on them.
Secondly, the final service quality scale is developed after testing the dimensions and items for assessing the service quality of the public sport facility and testing validity and reliability for the items of the questionnaire drawn up through the result of inquiring into the literature and focus group interview of consumers.
Thirdly, the measured service quality are analyzed by demographic factor, by sports for all participation factor, and by service quality-related factor.
The instrument used by this study to develop the service quality scale of the public sport facility included focus group interview of consumers, the pilot test questionnaire and the main test questionnaire. Data for analysis of the measured service quality are the evaluative item of performance for 24 items which were developed as the final scale through the analysis of the main test results. Demographic factor, sports for all participation factor and service quality-related factor were established as the factors for analysis of measured service quality.
Consumers in the public sports facility located in Seoul as of 1996 were selected as the population of test in this study and randomly sampled. Adult men and women more than 20 years of age were cluster sampled who were using any facility for more than one month of those using any of 5 public sport facilities with the use of the random sampling method. 150 persons in the pilot test and 1,200 persons in the main test were cluster sampled, and data for analysis were used for 124 samples in the pilot test and for 805 samples in the main test.
Data from the focus group interview of consumers were content analyzed for each service quality factor tape-recording the content of free discussion with 10 consumers of the public sport facility. Both the pilot test and the main test were conducted by pay a personal visit to the public sport facility, distributing the questionnaire to respondents and asking them to respond to the content of questions in a self-administration method. Then, completed questionnaires were withdrawn.
The data, judged to be poor and unreliable in relation to the content of responses, of withdrawn questionnaires, were excluded from the object of analysis. After analyzable data were stored in the computer, descriptive analysis of variance, correlation analysis and factor analysis were utilized using SAS statistical software package.
Descriptive analysis and analysis of variance were conducted by using SAS statistical software package in an attempt to analyze the characteristics of the service quality provided by the public sport facility by demographic factor, by sports for all participation factor, by service quality-related factor with the use of the service quality measures of the public sport facility newly developed through the procedure for developing the measure of pilot and main test.
As a result of analyzing data according to this method and procedure, the study results were drawn:
Firstly, a theoretical analysis was made of the concept and component of service quality provided by the public sport facility. As a result, both SERVQUAL, the typical service quality scale, and QUESC, the service quality scale of the sport facility, were compared and analyzed based upon functional quality and technical quality which are Gronroos(1984) two dimensional service quality constructs. And they were used as basic material for forming the item of developing service quality measures to measure the service quality of the public sport facility.
Secondly, as a result of making a content of the focus group interview of consumers in the concrete process of developing measures, 38 items were composed, within their unwrapped range, for the factors that the consumers of public sport facility assessed while actually using them. The pilot test results showed that there were 12 factors when the eigen value of more than one was set as the base. And the proportion that these 12 factors accounted for total service quality was about 83 percent. As a result of the main test, 6 dimensions of 24 items were finally recomposed through the process of elaboration that excluded the items that showed high factor load in more than one factor on have the very low factor division coefficient of factor analysis. Finally, factor analysis was made of 24 items as the factorial validity and reliability coefficient to test the validity and reliability of the measures finally developed. It was shown that their validity and reliability were very high.
Thirdly, as a result of analyzing the measured service quality, it was shown that functional service quality and technical service quality partially varied by demographic factor by sports for all participation factor and by service quality-related factor and that such factors as main facility, incidental facility, program, contribution to the community, personnel, director and so on did so by sub-factor.
Key words: public sport facility, consumer, service, service quality, functional quality, technical quality, scale development