Development and Validation of Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire: An Empirical Study in the Healthcare Industry in Taiwan

Thursday, 10 July 2008: 3:35 PM
Shew-Fang Shieh, DBA, MS, RN , Nursing Department, Cardinal Tien Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

Learning Objective 1: know the process of developing a valid instrument for research.

Learning Objective 2: know how to test the reliability and validity of an instrumnet in doing research.

Objectives: Developing a valid instrument to collect data in a research is a critical issue for the researcher. The aim of the study is to examine the reliability and validity of the instrument used to measure patient satisfaction, loyalty and switching costs.

Methods: A survey method with a Likert-type questionnaire was used in the study. Data were collected from the patients of three hospitals in Taiwan. An anonymous self-report questionnaire was personally administered to each participant who was asked to respond the questions according to his/her subjective viewpoint. A total of 370 questionnaires were distributed to the subjects. The response rate of the questionnaire was 93.0%. A total 309 valid questionnaires were keyed into statistical analysis program.

Results: The results of this research support all twenty-seven items of the questionnaire. The internal consistency reliability of three scales of customer satisfaction, loyalty and switching costs was satisfactory. When testing the validity of three constructs by running factor analysis of computer software, it shows that both the customer satisfaction scale and the switching costs scale could be attributed to two factors. Customer loyalty was identified as one of the factor. Those factors could be further used as the variables and reinserted into a hypothetical model to test multiple regression analysis based on the purpose of the research.

Conclusions: The results of this research provide valuable information associated with the psychometric properties of the instrument. In addition, the results of this research contribute to the knowledge of development and validation of an instrument for academics who may wish further enhance this filed of knowledge in more depth.

Keywords: customer satisfaction questionnaire, reliability and validity