Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Models of Structural Equations for Customer Satisfaction: a Case Study on Local Public Transport Situation

In this paper we shall focus our attention to a model of Structural Equations in order to analyse the satisfaction of young students daily using local public buses. Our starting point is a recent survey conducted by the Department of Statistics and Mathematics ``Diego de Castro'' of Torino with the collaboration of five local transport enterprises working on the same line. According to the evaluation expressed by the 359 subjects on some crucial aspects of the Quality perceived (such as safety of the travel, punctuality and comfort of the service, staff's professional level and/or courtesy,...), our aim is to ratify the casual relationships between the latent variables of the model and, at the same time, to provide for a dimension of Quality perceived by the customers. In order to identify the latent variables and the measurement groups, we resort to a preliminary confirmatory Factorial Analysis which gives us also some informations on the covariance between the latent variables themselves. Furthermore two models of structural equations are identified. Each system of structural equations is identified according to the standard notation stated by Lisrel methodology. The graphic representation of the path-analysis is then given for each model. To estimate the parameters of each model, according to the maximum likelihood criterion, we resort both to the Lisrel software implemented on SPSS interface (AMOS 3.6) and to sem package for R computing environement. Validation of the models will be proposed in terms of Chi-Square (CS), Goodness of Fit Index (GFI) and Root Mean Squared Residuals (RMR).