The authors catalogued commonly used satisfaction measures and then examined their reliability and explained variance. Furthermore, they explored the notion that affective measures may be better in capturing satisfaction with predominantly hedonic products, whereas cognitive measures may be better for products with mostly utilitarian benefits. To do this, the authors examined all measures in a hedonic and utilitarian service context. The authors found that a six-item 7-point semantic differential scale performed best across both service contexts, followed by a four-item 7-point semantic differential scale. The third best measure was a single-item 11-point percentage scale. Furthermore, they rejected the notion that affective measures should be used for hedonic services and cognitive measures for utilitarian services. Rather, measures that were shown to be of good quality (i.e., had high satisfaction loadings, good reliability, and low error variances) were equally applicable for measuring satisfaction for both types of services. In addition, all satisfaction measures captured both affective and cognitive aspects of satisfaction, independent of their scale anchors.
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