Abstract—The importance-performance grid is a marketing
instrument used to optimize the attributes of products in order
to increase the consumers’ satisfaction. A special place for
debates is represented by the way in which the importance of
attributes is determined, the direct research way having many
weak points, among which we mention: it aggravates the
application of the survey, the answers are already influenced by
the perceived performance of the products, the answers are not
authentic or they are too polite so that the values obtained are
high and the inter-item differences are little and pointless etc.
The aim of this paper is to test a mathematic method
recommended by the literature in the field, in order to
indirectly determine the importance of the attributes, starting
from the evaluation of the performance of products in relation
to global satisfaction.
Methodology contain: a survey through a questionnaire
which recorded the importance assigned by candidates to the
quality attributes and evaluated the performance of the
touristic services considering the quality attributes; determined
the importance of the attributes through the partial correlation
coefficient, by correlating the attributes’ perceived individual
performance with the global satisfaction and compared the two
matrixes pertaining to the information obtained by the two
ways considering the marketing decisions.
The results obtained indirectly through the partial
correlation coefficient substantially differs from the results
obtained by directly investigating the importance of the
attributes, in order to make marketing decisions. The present
paper continues previous researches, in which we tested two
methods meant to indirectly determine the importance of the
attributes, the Spearman coefficient and the entropy calculus.
Index Terms—Importance-performance analysis,
importance attributes, partial correlation, study case, tourism.
Olimpia-Iuliana Ban is with the Department of Economics, Faculty of
Economics, University of Oradea (e-mail: oban@ uoradea.ro).
Victoria Bogdan is with the Department of Finance-Accounting, Faculty
of Economics, University of Oradea (e-mail: vbogdan@ uoradea.ro).
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Cite:Olimpia-Iuliana Ban and Victoria Bogdan, "Using Partial Correlation Coefficient to Assess the
Importance of Quality Attributes: Study Case for Tourism
Romanian Consumers," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 21-24, 2013.