Consumer Sentiment toward Offshored Services Scale (OFFSERVSENT)

Abstract

The Consumer Sentiment toward Offshored Services Scale (OFFSERVSENT) is a multidimensional psychometric instrument developed by Shawn T. Thelen, Boonghee Yoo, and Vincent P. Magnini (2011) to operationalize, measure, and evaluate the multifaceted psychological, sociopolitical, and economic attitudes held by domestic consumers toward corporations that offshore their customer and technical services to foreign destinations. As globalization accelerated the migration of white-collar and front-line service functions—such as inbound customer support, software development, telemarketing, and claims processing—firms frequently encountered severe domestic consumer backlash. Developed through an extensive multi-stage methodology encompassing qualitative in-depth field interviews, expert panel item purification, and two independent rounds of nationwide consumer panel surveys in the United States, the scale comprises 26 items organized into five distinct first-order dimensions that converge upon a singular, higher-order consumer sentiment construct. These five dimensions include: Free-Trade Resentment (6 items), Foreign Worker Enmity (5 items), Data Security (5 items), Communication (4 items), and Customer/Foreign-Worker Disconnect (6 items). Responses are captured using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), with higher aggregate scores reflecting higher levels of negative sentiment, consumer resistance, and protectionist animosity toward offshore service delivery. Psychometric evaluation demonstrates exceptional composite reliability ($
ho_c$ spanning .89 to .95) and robust average variance extracted (ranging from .61 to .77), alongside rigorous evidence of convergent, discriminant, nomological, and predictive validity regarding customer service satisfaction, brand equity, and consumer boycott intentions. OFFSERVSENT remains a foundational measurement tool in services marketing, international business, and consumer psychology.

Keywords

Consumer Sentiment, Offshoring, Services Marketing, OFFSERVSENT, Free-Trade Resentment, Foreign Worker Enmity, Data Security Anxiety, Intercultural Communication, Consumer Ethnocentrism, Psychometrics

Authors

The Consumer Sentiment toward Offshored Services Scale was developed and validated by an interdisciplinary team of marketing and international business scholars:

• Shawn T. Thelen, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, Frank G. Zarb School of Business, Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, United States. Dr. Thelen’s research focuses on global consumer behavior, service offshoring dynamics, consumer animosity, and international retail strategy.
• Boonghee Yoo, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, Frank G. Zarb School of Business, Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, United States. Dr. Yoo is an authority on brand equity measurement, cross-cultural marketing methodology, structural equation modeling, and consumer ethnocentrism.
• Vincent P. Magnini, Ph.D. — Professor of Hospitality and Tourism Management and Executive Director of the Institute for Service Excellence. Dr. Magnini has published extensively on service operations, front-line service encounters, consumer psychology in service interactions, and international human resource management.

Purpose

Over the past three decades, multinational corporations have increasingly engaged in service offshoring—the geographic relocation of business service processes from domestic headquarters to offshore subsidiaries or third-party service providers located in lower-cost economies such as India, the Philippines, and Central America. While this operational strategy was initially justified through substantial labor arbitrage and round-the-clock service capabilities, management scholars and corporate executives quickly recognized that service offshoring generated acute consumer resistance, brand reputation erosion, and diminished perceived service quality in domestic markets.

Prior to the establishment of the OFFSERVSENT scale, marketing practitioners and academic researchers lacked an empirically validated, psychometrically sound measurement instrument tailored specifically to service offshoring. Existing measurement scales in international business primarily captured broader, macro-level constructs, such as the Consumer Ethnocentrism Scale (CETSCALE; Shimp & Sharma, 1987) or the Consumer Animosity Model (Klein et al., 1998). Although these tools effectively assessed consumer refusal to purchase foreign-manufactured physical goods, they were structurally inadequate for diagnosing the complex, real-time, interpersonal, and communicative frictions inherent to service encounters. Unlike static physical products, services are intangible, inseparable, heterogeneous, and perishable, making direct interaction between domestic customers and foreign service personnel paramount.

The primary purpose of the OFFSERVSENT scale is therefore twofold:

1. Diagnostic Research Instrument: To provide academic researchers with a theoretically grounded, multidimensional scale that isolates the psychological, geopolitical, functional, and socio-emotional drivers of consumer resistance to offshored services. By separating economic protectionism from communicative difficulty and technological privacy anxieties, the scale facilitates granular structural equation modeling of international service dynamics.
2. Managerial and Strategic Decision-Making: To supply corporate executives, service design architects, and customer relationship managers with an actionable assessment tool. Organizations can deploy the scale to audit their customer base before, during, or after offshore transitions. By identifying whether customer dissatisfaction stems primarily from perceived communicative accents, institutional data privacy concerns, or macro-political protectionism, firms can calibrate targeted mitigation strategies—such as domestic tier-two routing, accent neutralization training, heightened security certifications, or repatriating (reshoring) critical front-line touchpoints.

Psychological Construct

The Consumer Sentiment toward Offshored Services construct is defined as a systemic constellation of negative affective evaluations, cognitive appraisals, and behavioral predispositions held by domestic consumers regarding service encounters executed by offshore personnel. Rather than operating as a unidimensional antipathy, the construct reflects a complex, hierarchically organized cognitive network comprising five distinct first-order dimensions loading onto a higher-order latent factor.

1. Free-Trade Resentment

Free-Trade Resentment measures an individual’s ideological, economic, and sociopolitical opposition to globalized service distribution based on perceived harm to the domestic labor market. Domestic consumers frequently interpret corporate offshoring not as economic efficiency, but as an unpatriotic abandonment of local workers. This dimension assesses beliefs that national governments should intervene via protectionist policies, regulatory tariffs, or legislative restrictions to safeguard domestic jobs from foreign low-wage competition. High scores reflect deep socio-economic protectionism and the attribution of domestic unemployment, wage stagnation, and middle-class economic decline to corporate offshoring policies.

2. Foreign Worker Enmity

Foreign Worker Enmity operationalizes the affective, emotional, and social hostility directed specifically toward overseas customer contact agents. Grounded in intergroup tension and out-group derogation, this dimension captures personal antipathy, generalized xenophobia, and resentment triggered when domestic consumers realize they are interacting with non-domestic personnel. While Free-Trade Resentment targets macroeconomic policy and corporate behavior, Foreign Worker Enmity is focused interpersonally upon the foreign laborers themselves, manifesting as irritation, disdain, and hostility during live service transactions.

3. Data Security

Data Security measures the heightened cognitive anxiety, systemic distrust, and perceived vulnerability domestic consumers experience regarding the safety of their proprietary personal, financial, and medical information when processed across foreign jurisdictions. Offshored service centers routinely handle sensitive data, including credit card numbers, Social Security identifiers, and confidential health records. This dimension assesses consumer perceptions that foreign regulatory environments, legal frameworks, and offshore operational standards lack adequate safeguards against identity theft, corporate espionage, and institutional fraud.

4. Communication

The Communication dimension captures the practical, linguistic, and phonetic barriers that emerge during synchronous service encounters between domestic consumers and non-native service representatives. Specifically, it assesses consumer frustration concerning heavy foreign accents, dialectal mismatches, inadequate vocabulary, rigid script adherence, and poor auditory comprehension. In service recovery or high-stress technical support scenarios, even minor phonetic misunderstandings can induce significant cognitive load, escalate consumer agitation, and prolong transaction duration.

5. Customer/Foreign-Worker Disconnect

Customer/Foreign-Worker Disconnect reflects an intercultural and socio-relational empathy gap. This dimension operationalizes the consumer perception that offshore personnel fundamentally lack the cultural capital, localized common sense, idiomatic fluency, and nuanced social context required to resolve domestic problems effectively. It encompasses consumer beliefs that domestic service agents possess inherent cultural superiority in understanding local lifestyle nuances, consumer expectations, and unstated emotional cues, resulting in an unbridgeable psychological distance between the domestic client and the offshore agent.

Theoretical Framework

The architecture of the OFFSERVSENT scale is grounded in several foundational paradigms within social psychology, intercultural communication, and consumer behavior.

Social Identity Theory and Realistic Conflict Theory

At the sociopolitical level, the scale draws extensively upon Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and Realistic Group Conflict Theory (Sherif, 1966). Social Identity Theory posits that individuals categorize themselves and others into in-groups (“us”) and out-groups (“them”), deriving self-esteem from in-group favoritism while exhibiting systematic bias against out-groups. In the context of service offshoring, domestic workers and consumers represent the salient in-group, whereas offshore personnel represent the competing out-group.

Realistic Conflict Theory deepens this dynamic by demonstrating that intergroup hostility intensifies dramatically when groups perceive zero-sum competition over scarce, highly valued resources—in this case, domestic employment opportunities, technical career tracks, and national economic security. When domestic consumers observe local call centers closing while corporate earnings rise via offshore labor migration, their psychological reaction transcends personal inconvenience, manifesting as collective, institutional Free-Trade Resentment and out-group Foreign Worker Enmity.

Intercultural Communication and Expectancy Disconfirmation

At the micro-interactional level, OFFSERVSENT integrates Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles et al., 1991) and the Expectancy Disconfirmation Paradigm (Oliver, 1980). Communication Accommodation Theory highlights how conversational partners adjust their speech styles, accents, and pacing to achieve mutual understanding. When offshore service agents display inadequate linguistic accommodation, heavy phonetic interference, or robotic adherence to standard operating procedure scripts, domestic consumers experience communication breakdowns.

Under Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory, consumers enter service encounters with baseline normative expectations regarding communicative efficiency, active listening, and cultural empathy. When offshore interactions require repeated clarification, phonetic straining, and unfulfilled cultural nuance, an acute negative disconfirmation occurs, directly fueling the Customer/Foreign-Worker Disconnect dimension.

Perceived Risk Theory

The inclusion of the Data Security dimension aligns directly with Perceived Risk Theory in consumer decision-making (Bauer, 1960; Featherman & Pavlou, 2003). In high-involvement service sectors—such as banking, mortgage underwriting, and telecommunications—consumers perceive elevated financial, legal, and privacy risks. Because offshore service centers operate under unfamiliar legal jurisdictions outside domestic judicial oversight, consumers perceive an absence of institutional control, triggering heightened vulnerability and privacy anxiety.

Validity

The OFFSERVSENT scale underwent rigorous psychometric evaluation across multiple developmental stages to establish comprehensive construct, convergent, discriminant, nomological, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

To establish construct and convergent validity, Thelen, Yoo, and Magnini (2011) executed a comprehensive item generation process informed by 42 qualitative depth interviews with consumers, followed by expert panel screening. In the subsequent structural validation phase across two national consumer panel samples, all 26 items exhibited statistically significant, high factor loadings onto their specified first-order constructs (all standardized $lambda > .70$, $p < .001$).

Convergent validity was further demonstrated by calculating the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for each dimension, with every construct exceeding the established .50 benchmark (Fornell & Larcker, 1981):

• Free-Trade Resentment: AVE = .65
• Foreign Worker Enmity: AVE = .61
• Data Security: AVE = .72
• Communication: AVE = .68
• Customer/Foreign-Worker Disconnect: AVE = .77

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was confirmed using the Fornell-Larcker criterion. For each pair of latent constructs, the average variance extracted exceeded the square of the inter-construct correlation ($\phi^2$). Furthermore, nested confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model comparisons demonstrated that constraining any inter-factor correlation to unity (1.0) resulted in a statistically significant deterioration in model fit ($Deltachi^2, p < .001$), confirming that the five dimensions represent conceptually distinct psychological facets rather than overlapping redundancies.

Nomological and Predictive Validity

Nomological validity was validated by examining the structural relationships between the higher-order OFFSERVSENT construct and established marketing outcome variables within structural equation models. The authors demonstrated that consumer sentiment toward offshored services exhibited strong, statistically significant negative correlations with overall service satisfaction ($eta = -.54$, $p < .001$), service quality perceptions ($eta = -.49$,$p < .001$), and corporate brand loyalty ($eta = -.42$,$p < .001$). Furthermore, OFFSERVSENT positively predicted consumer switching intentions, negative word-of-mouth propagation, and active support for consumer boycott campaigns targeting offshoring corporations.

Reliability

The reliability of the OFFSERVSENT scale was evaluated across two independent, heterogeneous national consumer samples using both internal consistency metrics and composite reliability estimations.

Internal Consistency and Composite Reliability

Traditional Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficients and Composite Reliability ($
ho_c$) values both surpassed established psychometric thresholds (minimum .70, recommended .80 for robust structural modeling). The composite reliabilities reported in the foundational validation study are as follows:

• Customer/Foreign-Worker Disconnect (6 items): $ ext{CR} = .95$
• Data Security (5 items): $ ext{CR} = .93$
• Free-Trade Resentment (6 items): $ ext{CR} = .92$
• Communication (4 items): $ ext{CR} = .89$
• Foreign Worker Enmity (5 items): $ ext{CR} = .89$

The high composite reliabilities indicate exceptional internal consistency, confirming that measurement error across all five subscales is minimal. Furthermore, item-to-total correlations across all 26 indicators remained consistently above .65, with no single item removal improving overall construct reliability.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the OFFSERVSENT instrument was established using sequential exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) utilizing maximum likelihood estimation.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (Round 1)

During the initial scale purification phase, an exploratory factor analysis with oblique (Promax) rotation was conducted on the initial pool of purified candidate items. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy exceeded .93, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was highly significant ($p < .001$). The analysis revealed a clear five-factor solution with eigenvalues exceeding 1.0, accounting for over 72% of the total cumulative variance. Items exhibiting low factor loadings (< .60) or substantial cross-loadings (> .30 on secondary factors) were systematically eliminated, yielding the definitive 26-item inventory.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Higher-Order Modeling (Round 2)

To confirm the structural stability of the instrument, a second-order confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on an independent national cross-sectional validation sample. The hypothesized structural model posited five correlated first-order latent factors that load directly onto a single, overarching second-order latent construct: Consumer Sentiment toward Offshored Services.

The second-order structural model yielded excellent global fit indices, surpassing conventional cutoffs established by Hu and Bentler (1999):

• Chi-Square to Degrees of Freedom Ratio ($\chi^2 / df$): 2.14
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .97
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .96
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .048 (90% Confidence Interval: [.042, .054])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .039

Second-order factor loadings demonstrated that all five first-order dimensions loaded heavily and significantly onto the general OFFSERVSENT factor:

• Customer/Foreign-Worker Disconnect: $\gamma = .88$, $p < .001$
• Communication: $\gamma = .84$, $p < .001$
• Free-Trade Resentment: $\gamma = .79$, $p < .001$
• Data Security: $\gamma = .76$, $p < .001$
• Foreign Worker Enmity: $\gamma = .72$, $p < .001$

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The OFFSERVSENT instrument is structured as an objective, self-administered survey questionnaire designed for deployment in organizational audits, consumer panels, and experimental academic research.

• Instrument Name: Consumer Sentiment toward Offshored Services Scale (OFFSERVSENT)
• Primary Application: Assessment of domestic consumer attitudes, economic resentment, privacy anxiety, and communication friction toward corporate service offshoring.
• Target Population: Adult consumers (ages 18+) who interact with customer service contact centers, technical support hotlines, and telecommunications or financial service operations.
• Total Item Count: 26 items across five designated subscales:
• Free-Trade Resentment: 6 items
• Foreign Worker Enmity: 5 items
• Data Security: 5 items
• Communication: 4 items
• Customer/Foreign-Worker Disconnect: 6 items
• Response Format: 7-point Likert-type rating format:
• 1 = Strongly Disagree
• 2 = Disagree
• 3 = Somewhat Disagree
• 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree (Neutral)
• 5 = Somewhat Agree
• 6 = Agree
• 7 = Strongly Agree
• Administration Time: Approximately 6 to 10 minutes for full completion.
• Scoring and Indexing:
• Subscale scores are derived by calculating the unweighted arithmetic mean or sum of all items comprising that specific dimension.
• An overall OFFSERVSENT index can be computed by calculating the grand mean across all 26 items or by modeling a second-order latent factor in a structural equation modeling environment.
• All items are formulated in a positive direction reflecting negative sentiment; therefore, no reverse-scoring is required. Higher scores consistently indicate higher levels of consumer hostility, operational friction, and resistance to offshored service interactions.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Consumer Sentiment toward Offshored Services Scale was developed and published in 2011. The foundational psychometric study was published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (Volume 39, Issue 2, pages 270–289), an academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media.

The OFFSERVSENT scale is protected by academic copyright held by the authors and the publisher. Non-commercial academic research, university teaching, and non-profit scholarly investigations may utilize the scale framework under standard academic fair-use guidelines, provided that full attribution is given to the original authors and the primary publication. Commercial enterprises, corporate consulting firms, or commercial survey research platforms seeking to integrate the scale into fee-for-service consumer audits or proprietary market intelligence software should seek formal permission from Springer Nature via the Copyright Clearance Center (RightsLink) or contact the lead authors directly.

References

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• Sherif, M. (1966). In Common Predicament: Social Psychology of Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation. Houghton Mifflin.
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• Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.
• Thelen, S. T., Yoo, B., & Magnini, V. P. (2011). An examination of consumer sentiment toward offshored services. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 39(2), 270–289. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-010-0192-7

Items of the Scale