Adaptação e validação da escala de Westbrook & Dholakia (2006) para mensurar o relacionamento dos alunos de pós-graduação no contexto brasileiro

Abstract

The relationship marketing is essential to create a bond between institutions and students. Considering the importance of the development of the relationship among higher education institutions (HEI) and its students, this study aims to adapt and validate a scale to evaluate the relationship between postgraduate students and the higher education institutions which they attend, as proposed by Westbrook and Dholakia (2006), under the Brazilian context. This is a quantitative research, conducted with a sample of 343 postgraduate students, using exploratory factor analysis and reliability for refinement of the scale and confirmatory factor analysis to validate the scale in the Brazilian context. The results showed adequate levels of reliability and convergent validity, discriminant and dimensionality for the dimensions of the variables studied. The research contributes to the expansion of studies on relationship marketing in higher education institutions, since there are few studies investigating the relationship of postgraduate students and none of the instruments relating students of postgraduate programs are validated for the Brazilian context. In the final considerations, implications of this study and suggestions for future studies are presented.