Environmental Stimuli, Satisfaction, and Behavioral Intentions in the Alternative Golf Context–Model Questionnaire

Abstract

The Environmental Stimuli, Satisfaction, and Behavioral Intentions in the Alternative Golf Context Model Questionnaire is an empirical psychometric instrument designed to evaluate consumer perceptions, affective cognitive evaluations, and post-consumption behavioral patterns within contemporary, technology-driven sport-entertainment facilities (such as Topgolf, Drive Shack, and screen golf simulation lounges). Grounded in an extended formulation of the classical Mehrabian–Russell Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, this questionnaire operationalizes environmental stimuli across three multidimensional hospitality and leisure vectors: physical environment quality, food and beverage quality, and service quality. These environmental antecedents drive the consumer organism state—manifested through customer satisfaction—which subsequently governs downstream behavioral outcomes conceptualized as activity involvement and behavioral intentions (including revisit propensity and positive word-of-mouth recommendations).

The operationalized measurement model comprises 21 items across six latent dimensions, administered using a standardized seven-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree). Psychometric validation across adult consumer cohorts demonstrates exceptional measurement integrity. Confirmatory factor analyses reveal robust construct validity, with standardized factor loadings ranging from 0.655 to 0.896, and average variance extracted (AVE) values spanning 0.615 to 0.691, exceeding conservative psychometric thresholds. Evaluated across structural equation modeling procedures, the instrument exhibits strong goodness-of-fit indices (χ² = 362.366, df = 137, χ²/df = 2.645, CFI = 0.964, TLI = 0.955, NFI = 0.944, and RMSEA = 0.058). Reliability diagnostics confirm high internal consistency, yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients between 0.827 and 0.890 and composite reliability scores between 0.818 and 0.891 across all subscales. This assessment system provides hospitality managers, sports sociologists, and consumer psychologists with a standardized diagnostic tool to quantify experiential service delivery, consumer pleasure, ongoing brand engagement, and customer retention within hybrid sporttainment ecosystems.

Keywords

Alternative Golf, Environmental Stimuli, Mehrabian-Russell Model, Customer Satisfaction, Behavioral Intentions, Activity Involvement, Servicescape, Hospitality Management, Service Quality, Sports Marketing

Authors

The measurement model and its underlying empirical validation were established by a collaborative team of hospitality management, tourism, and consumer behavior scholars at the University of Central Florida:

• Jeeyeon Jeannie Hahm, Ph.D. — Department of Tourism, Events, and Attractions, Rosen College of Hospitality Management, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, United States. ORCID: 0000-0003-0470-5342. Email: [email protected]. Correspondence Address: 9907 Universal Blvd., Orlando, Florida 32819, United States.
• David J. Kwun, Ph.D. — Department of Hospitality Services, Rosen College of Hospitality Management, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, United States. Email: [email protected].
• Juhee Kang, Ph.D. — Department of Hospitality Services, Rosen College of Hospitality Management, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, United States. Email: [email protected].

Purpose

The emergence of “alternative golf”—characterized by high-tech, microchipped golf balls, digital shot-tracking screens, upscale hospitality bays, chef-driven culinary offerings, and communal entertainment spaces—represents a fundamental paradigm shift away from traditional, green-grass 18-hole golf courses. While green-grass golf is traditionally governed by strict etiquette, substantial time commitments, high barrier-to-entry costs, and an athletic focus, alternative golf merges sport with casual social leisure, gamification, and commercial dining. Consequently, standard sport participation inventories or traditional restaurant evaluation tools fail to capture the complex, multi-sensory interactions inherent to this hybrid recreational domain. The primary purpose of the Environmental Stimuli, Satisfaction, and Behavioral Intentions Model Questionnaire is to bridge this methodological void by providing a psychometrically validated, domain-specific measurement system that quantifies how integrated spatial, culinary, and human service encounters shape psychological satisfaction and enduring behavioral fidelity.

From an applied research and management perspective, this tool fulfills several diagnostic functions:

• Holistic Servicescape Auditing: The scale enables operations managers to dissect customer reactions into discrete, actionable environmental dimensions—distinguishing physical architectural atmosphere and digital technological tracking from frontline employee interactions and culinary offerings.
• Consumer Life-Cycle and Retention Modeling: By evaluating both activity involvement (the degree to which an individual internalizes the sport-leisure practice into their lifestyle) and behavioral intentions (revisit probability and advocacy), researchers can model long-term customer lifetime value rather than single-transaction metrics.
• Market Segmentation and Motivation Profiling: Because the overarching framework incorporates recreational motivation (e.g., social affiliation vs. competitive achievement) and athletic skill levels as moderating factors, applying the scale helps organizations identify differing experiential thresholds between novice entertainment-seekers and serious competitive golfers.
• Cross-Industry Generalizability: Beyond alternative golf facilities, this diagnostic questionnaire offers an adaptable template for modern “sporttainment” platforms, such as tech-infused indoor cricket, boutique bowling lounges, interactive darts bars, and immersive simulator entertainment venues.

Psychological Construct

The instrument operationalizes six distinct latent psychological constructs that capture the complete continuum of environmental perception, affective evaluation, lifestyle integration, and intended future action:

1. Physical Environment Quality

Physical environment quality pertains to the customer’s cognitive and sensory assessment of the physical and digital servicescape. Rooted in environmental design theory, this dimension evaluates bay architecture, seating comfort, visual aesthetics, cleanliness, and the operational sophistication of the technology-driven tracking interfaces and ball dispensers. In the alternative golf context, this encompasses modern, climate-controlled hitting bays, responsive digital shot-tracing technology, visual user interfaces, and the facility’s overall visual ambiance.

2. Food and Beverage Quality

Food and beverage quality captures the culinary dimensions of the entertainment experience. Unlike conventional driving ranges where food service is secondary or restricted to vending and snack bars, alternative golf platforms operate as full-service dining destinations. This construct measures menu diversity, visual presentation, ingredient freshness, sensory taste appeal, and perceived price-to-value equity. It quantifies how the gastronomic offering contributes to the overall hospitality experience.

3. Service Quality

Service quality reflects customer appraisals of human-to-human relational delivery during the guest journey. Adapting fundamental principles from the SERVQUAL model, this dimension measures the interpersonal warmth, competence, reliability, empathy, and speed demonstrated by guest service hosts, bay attendants, food servers, and bay-reservation personnel. It emphasizes operational dependability and relational attentiveness.

4. Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction represents the central internal organismic state within the model. Conceptualized through expectancy-disconfirmation theory and cumulative affective appraisal, this construct reflects the guest’s overarching psychological validation that their visit was rewarding, enjoyable, cognitively sound, and emotionally pleasing. It synthesizes discrete service encounters into an overall affective evaluation of the leisure episode.

5. Activity Involvement

Activity involvement operationalizes the degree of psychological identification, personal relevance, and ego involvement the consumer connects with alternative golf as an ongoing leisure pursuit. Drawing upon leisure involvement theory, this dimension assesses whether the guest views participation as an integral component of their recreational identity, a meaningful social ritual, and an activity worthy of ongoing temporal and financial commitment.

6. Behavioral Intentions

Behavioral intentions serve as the primary downstream outcome construct, reflecting the consumer’s self-reported probability of enacting positive future behaviors toward the brand. Consistent with the Theory of Planned Behavior, this dimension measures three critical loyalty markers: the explicit intent to physically revisit the venue in the short and medium term, willingness to recommend the facility to familial and peer networks, and proactive generation of positive word-of-mouth (WOM) communication.

Theoretical Framework

The structural foundation of this measurement model rests upon an extended version of the classical Mehrabian–Russell (M-R) Environmental Psychology Model (Mehrabian & Russell, 1974), integrated with Bitner’s Servicescape Paradigm (Bitner, 1992) and Leisure Involvement Theory (Havitz & Dimanche, 1997).

The Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) Paradigm

The classical M-R paradigm posits that objective external environmental stimuli (S) trigger internal affective, cognitive, and neurobiological states within the individual organism (O), which in turn dictate approach or avoidance behaviors (R). Historically, environmental psychologists conceptualized the organismic state primarily through emotional dimensions: Pleasure, Arousal, and Dominance (PAD). In hospitality and services marketing, Bitner translated these abstract architectural principles into the “Servicescape” framework, demonstrating that physical design, ambient conditions, spatial layout, and human artifacts serve as explicit cognitive cues that shape customer expectations, mood states, and perceived service value.

Hahm, Kwun, and Kang (2023) advanced the M-R paradigm by tailoring its structural linkages to the multi-attribute realities of modern sporttainment. First, they expanded the Stimulus (S) stage beyond passive architectural aesthetics to encapsulate a tri-component environmental bundle: the built technological environment, culinary excellence, and interpersonal frontline service. Second, they designated Customer Satisfaction as the central Organism (O) conduit, positing that in experiential commercial settings, cognitive satisfaction and hedonic pleasure mediate the transfer of environmental perceptions into sustained loyalty. Third, they diversified the Response (R) spectrum: while standard S-O-R studies limit approach behavior to immediate purchasing or immediate repurchase intentions, this model introduces Activity Involvement alongside Behavioral Intentions, conceptualizing response not merely as transactional re-patronage, but as lifestyle absorption and social advocacy.

The Moderating Architecture: Motivation and Skill

The extended theoretical framework incorporates individual difference variables as critical boundary conditions. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory and recreational specialization models, the authors theorize that customer perceptions of environmental stimuli do not translate into satisfaction uniformly across all patrons. Instead, recreational motivation (ranging from casual hedonism and socialization to competitive athletic practice) and golfer skill level (novice, intermediate, advanced) moderate these structural relationships. For example, highly skilled traditional golfers may place greater weight on technological simulation accuracy and equipment reliability, whereas social-hedonic visitors are more strongly influenced by food and beverage variety, ambient music, and service responsiveness.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the instrument was tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) and rigorous construct validation methodologies on empirical data collected from active adult patrons of commercial alternative golf complexes across the United States.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity determines the degree to which individual items operationalizing a latent construct share a high proportion of common variance. In the validation study (Hahm et al., 2023), convergent validity was demonstrated using two psychometric benchmarks:

• Standardized Factor Loadings: All standardized item loadings on their respective hypothesized latent constructs were statistically significant at p < 0.001. Individual factor loadings spanned from 0.655 to 0.896, well above the recommended 0.50 cutoff and largely exceeding the preferred 0.70 benchmark for indicator reliability.
• Average Variance Extracted (AVE): The calculated AVE coefficients for all six latent constructs ranged between 0.615 and 0.691. Because every construct exceeded the strict Fornell and Larcker (1981) threshold of 0.50, the latent variables account for the majority of the variance across their corresponding measurement indicators.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity assesses whether constructs intended to measure conceptually distinct theoretical concepts are statistically distinct. Discriminant validity was verified using the Fornell–Larcker criterion: the squared correlation between any pair of latent constructs must be less than the AVE of each individual construct. In this instrument’s measurement model, every squared inter-construct correlation fell below the corresponding AVE values, demonstrating that constructs like Activity Involvement, Customer Satisfaction, and Behavioral Intentions reflect non-redundant, empirically distinct psychological dimensions.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity was established through structural path analysis. As hypothesized by the underlying theoretical framework, environmental stimuli (Physical Environment, Food & Beverage, and Service Quality) exhibited direct, statistically significant positive paths to Customer Satisfaction. In turn, Customer Satisfaction demonstrated strong, positive predictive paths to both Activity Involvement and Behavioral Intentions, verifying the directional relationships specified by the extended Mehrabian–Russell model.

Reliability

The scale exhibits high internal consistency and measurement precision, evidenced across both traditional Cronbach’s alpha diagnostics and composite reliability (CR) calculations:

• Cronbach’s Alpha (α): Across all subscales, Cronbach’s alpha values ranged from 0.827 to 0.890. These coefficients comfortably surpass the traditional academic threshold of 0.70 (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994) and satisfy the stricter 0.80 benchmark recommended for mature, standardized diagnostic instruments.
• Composite Reliability (CR): To account for potential variations in indicator loadings, composite reliability scores were calculated using factor analytic parameters. The resulting CR values ranged from 0.818 to 0.891, confirming that the latent indicators consistently tap their respective psychological targets without excessive measurement error.
• Stability and Test-Retest Considerations: While structural equation field testing relies on cross-sectional survey administration, split-half and multi-group invariance tests across demographic partitions (gender, age cohorts, recreational frequency) further confirm the structural stability of the latent configuration.

Factor Analysis

A rigorous Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) using maximum likelihood estimation was conducted to assess the overall structural integrity of the six-factor measurement model. The analyzed structure comprises: Physical Environment Quality (4 items), Food and Beverage Quality (4 items), Service Quality (4 items), Customer Satisfaction (3 items), Activity Involvement (3 items), and Behavioral Intentions (3 items).

Model Fit Diagnostics

The CFA results demonstrated an excellent fit between the hypothesized measurement architecture and the empirical data. All primary goodness-of-fit indices met or exceeded accepted psychometric standards:

• Chi-Square Goodness-of-Fit: χ² = 362.366, degrees of freedom (df) = 137, with a ratio of χ²/df = 2.645. This value sits well below the conservative upper threshold of 3.0, indicating acceptable discrepancy between the sample covariance matrix and the implied model matrix.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): CFI = 0.964, surpassing the standard 0.95 cutoff for exceptional incremental fit.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): TLI = 0.955, indicating that the relative improvement per degree of freedom over the null baseline is outstanding.
• Normed Fit Index (NFI): NFI = 0.944, exceeding the conventional 0.90 threshold.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): RMSEA = 0.058, with a 90% confidence interval falling well within the acceptable upper boundary of 0.08, confirming minimal residual error.

Factor Loadings and Parameter Overview

All 21 manifest items loaded robustly and significantly on their designated latent factors. Parameter estimations demonstrated that bay aesthetics and interactive tracking reliability are primary anchors for physical environment quality; menu diversity and sensory taste appeal anchor food and beverage quality; and employee responsiveness and dependability anchor service quality. No substantial cross-loadings or modification index anomalies were detected, confirming that the six latent constructs operate as distinct structural entities.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Environmental Stimuli, Satisfaction, and Behavioral Intentions in the Alternative Golf Context Model Questionnaire
• Constructs Measured: Physical Environment Quality, Food and Beverage Quality, Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction, Activity Involvement, Behavioral Intentions
• Test Type: Standardized self-report psychometric inventory / survey questionnaire
• Target Population: Adult consumers (aged 18 years and older) who patronize commercial alternative golf, driving range entertainment, or digital golf simulation venues
• Administration Format: Standardized electronic survey (web-based, tablet kiosk, or mobile post-visit feedback interface) or self-administered printed questionnaire
• Total Item Count: 21 items
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat Disagree, 4 = Neutral / Neither Agree nor Disagree, 5 = Somewhat Agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly Agree)
• Subscale Structural Breakdown:
  • Physical Environment Quality: Items 1, 2, 3, 4
  • Food and Beverage Quality: Items 5, 6, 7, 8
  • Service Quality: Items 9, 10, 11, 12
  • Customer Satisfaction: Items 13, 14, 15
  • Activity Involvement: Items 16, 17, 18
  • Behavioral Intentions: Items 19, 20, 21
• Scoring and Computational Rules:
  • All items are worded positively; no reverse scoring is required.
  • Individual dimension scores are computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of the items comprising each respective subscale (ranging from 1.00 to 7.00).
  • Higher mean scores in the environmental dimensions (Physical Environment, Food and Beverage, Service Quality) indicate superior servicescape appraisal.
  • Scores on Customer Satisfaction, Activity Involvement, and Behavioral Intentions above 5.00 generally denote positive customer affective states, high recreational attachment, and a strong likelihood of re-patronage and positive advocacy.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The scale was developed, validated, and published in 2023 by Jeeyeon Jeannie Hahm, David J. Kwun, and Juhee Kang. It was introduced in their empirical study published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management.

Licensing and Academic Access: The scale is open for non-commercial research, academic inquiry, higher-education teaching, and institutional evaluation. Academic researchers may utilize, reproduce, and adapt the items for scientific investigations without royalty fees, provided full academic attribution is granted through citation of the original source publication. Commercial market-research implementations, brand consultancy applications, or automated software integrations should reference the published literature or establish contact with the corresponding author ([email protected]) regarding intellectual property permissions.

References

• Bitner, M. J. (1992). Servicescapes: The impact of physical surroundings on customers and employees. Journal of Marketing, 56(2), 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299205600205
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Hahm, J. J., Kwun, D. J., & Kang, J. (2023). Analysis of environmental stimuli, satisfaction, and behavioral responses: An extended Mehrabian-Russell model to alternative golf. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 109, Article 103407. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2022.103407
• Havitz, M. E., & Dimanche, F. (1997). Propositions for testing the involvement construct in recreational and tourism contexts. Leisure Sciences, 19(4), 245–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490409709512255
• Mehrabian, A., & Russell, J. A. (1974). An approach to environmental psychology. The MIT Press.
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Oliver, R. L. (1980). A cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions. Journal of Marketing Research, 17(4), 460–469. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378001700405
• Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1988). SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality. Journal of Retailing, 64(1), 12–40.

Items of the Scale