Construct · 6 fields · 13 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, six constructs Nearest construct by meaningservice qualitycompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to quality is service quality.
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Three separate constructs that share the word. DeLone and McLean's 1992 review of 180 studies sorted the field's dependent variables into six categories and put two at the front: system quality, the desired characteristics of the system itself (reliability, response time, flexibility, ease of use), and information quality, the desired characteristics of its output (accuracy, timeliness, completeness, relevance). Their 2003 ten-year update added service quality, imported from SERVQUAL, for the support the IS department provides. Nelson, Todd, and Wixom pinned down the dimensions of the first two in 2005 and showed each has its own antecedents. In IS, then, quality is never one thing; it is a triad of perceived attributes that feed use and satisfaction, and a study that reports a single quality score has collapsed three constructs into one.[1][2][3]
The gap between what customers expect from a service and what they perceive they received, Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry's 1985 conceptual model, operationalized in 1988 as SERVQUAL: 22 items on five dimensions (tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy), each asked twice, once for expectations and once for perceptions, with quality as the difference. Cronin and Taylor's 1992 SERVPERF kept the 22 perception items, dropped the expectations, and showed the performance-only score predicted satisfaction and intentions better. Quality here is an attitude held by a customer about a provider, distinct by construction from satisfaction, which is a transaction-level reaction; the field has argued about the gap score for thirty years and about that distinction for almost as long.[4][5][6]
A property of a good that the seller knows and the buyer cannot verify before purchase. Akerlof's 1970 used-car market showed what follows: if buyers pay the average, owners of above-average cars withdraw, the average falls, and in the limit the market for good cars disappears. Quality is not defined by its dimensions at all; it is whatever the asymmetric information is about, and the interesting objects are the institutions (warranties, brands, licensing, chains) that let quality be signalled or guaranteed. No one is surveyed, and the perception of quality matters only through the price it commands.[7]
Donabedian's 1988 JAMA statement of what quality of care is and how to assess it. It has a technical component (the right thing done well) and an interpersonal component (the relationship in which it is done), and it can be inferred from three kinds of evidence: structure (the setting, staff, and equipment), process (what was done to and for the patient), and outcome (what happened to the patient's health). Donabedian's point was that each is only evidence, valid to the extent that structure predicts process and process predicts outcome. Quality here is a property of care delivered to a patient, assessed against professional standards, and the triad is a measurement design rather than a set of dimensions.[8]
Two definitions that the manufacturing tradition holds at once. Deming's 1986 Out of the Crisis makes quality a property of the process: reduce variation, drive out fear, stop inspecting quality in at the end, and quality is whatever the process reliably produces for the customer's future needs. Garvin's 1984 article asked what product quality really means and found five competing answers (transcendent, product-based, user-based, manufacturing-based, value-based) then proposed eight dimensions that cut across them: performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics, perceived quality. What differs is that quality is built into a product by a process and can be measured on the product without asking anyone; the user's perception is one dimension of eight, not the definition.[9][10]
A hierarchy of characteristics that a piece of software may possess, each decomposed into sub-characteristics and, at the bottom, into metrics. Boehm, Brown, and Lipow proposed the first tree in 1976; McCall, Richards, and Walters's 1977 report for the US Air Force fixed eleven factors under three headings of operation, revision, and transition; ISO/IEC 25010 in 2011 standardized eight product-quality characteristics (functional suitability, performance efficiency, compatibility, usability, reliability, security, maintainability, portability) and a separate quality-in-use model. The tradition inherits Garvin's habit of listing dimensions and adds the engineer's expectation that every leaf is measurable from the artefact. Quality here is what the code has, not what the user thinks of it, and usability is one branch of eight.[11][12][13]
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