Apparel Product Quality: Its Nature and Measurement

Abstract

An important issue of apparel -apparel product qualityhas not been significantly addressed in past research, particularly where the pre-purchase perceptions of consumers are concerned. The goal of this study is to identify how consumers define intrinsic apparel product quality. This will be accomplished by 1) examining the issue of quality as applied to products, 2) exploring past research on apparel product quality, 3) constructing a scale (ApparEx) to assess intrinsic apparel product quality, and 4) relating ApparEx with service quality as measured by SERVQUAL.Product quality is the consumer's judgment of the standard of performance for a product. The cues used by consumers to judge quality can be classified as either intrinsic or extrinsic. While the topic of apparel product quality has been examined in the literature, the focus of such efforts has been largely on perceptions of apparel quality resulting from post-use or post-exposure analysis. What has not received significant research attention are the pre-use expectations or beliefs about intrinsic apparel quality. These pre-use expectations can be expected to be a primary determining factor of consumer purchasing behavior.The initial stage in the development of an instrument to measure prepurchase perceptions of intrinsic apparel product quality is to generate a set of items deemed to cover the domain of the intrinsic apparel product quality construct. Since the literature suggests that this construct is multi-dimensional in nature, the scale was developed with the goal of identifying and measuring the salient dimensions of intrinsic apparel product quality. Drawn from studies of consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction with apparel items, texts documenting apparel manufacturing standards, and from technical standards drawn by the American Association for Textile Technology, eight dimensions of apparel quality were proposed. Seventy-four items were developed based on the above sources to address each proposed dimension of the construct. Four forms of the instrument were constructed, each focusing on a different apparel product classification (underwear/lingerie or sleepwear, casual sportswear, Ⓒ 2011 KAMS. All rights reserved. dresswear, and coats and jackets (outerwear)).The sampling design used in this study was a purposive one, using students enrolled in upper-division (junior and senior level) university business courses at major universities located in the Midwest and in the Southern U.S. The instrument was administered on-site to students present in selected business classes chosen to preclude the possibility of students being solicited more than once. Of the 984 questionnaires distributed, 131 were not determined to be usable, resulting in a usable return rate of 86.6 percent. Interestingly, the results suggest that the findings were not significantly different between the product categories indicating that the subject data may reasonably be pooled. A factor analysis resulted in seven factors being retained: 1) performance, 2) components, 3) garment ca...

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