4. SECOND STAGE SURVEY
The second stage of the survey employed direct questions requesting selected shippers to indicate the degree of perceive
d importance and satisfaction associated with each service feature presented in Table 1. Specifically,the respondents were requested to rate the importance and satisfaction of service elements on a seven-point scale. The scale ranged from 1 (the least important/satisfied) to 7 (the most important/satisfied). The target respondents at this stage of survey were shippers who had earlier responded to the first stage.Through face-to-face interviews and mail surveys with follow-up phone calls made to clarify the questionnaire, 19 and 15 responses were received from suppliers of automotive parts and
Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Vol.5, October, 2003 2227 consumer goods respectively. It appeared that there were few shippers who had previously participated in the first stage survey but did not respond to the second stage survey. This was perhaps attributed to the fact that the questionnaire used in the second stage survey demanded respondents to deal with an exhaustive list of service attributes. To encourage participation from the shippers, future studies may have to consider limiting the number of service features to be incorporated in the questionnaire.In the analysis of the responses, the mean and the standard deviation of the importance and satisfaction scores of each attribute were computed. Statistical tests were subsequently applied to categorize the service elements into statistically different
groups according to the level of perceived importance. Table 2 reported the service elements found to be statistically
most vital. They are listed in the decreasing order of mean importance scores