Dimensions of service quality in higher education – critical review (students’ perspective)

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the dimensions of service quality used in different countries across the world, especially in the higher education sector. Design/methodology/approach Content analysis is used to get a comprehensive insight of the studies accumulated from some of the selected databases such as Emerald Insight, Ebsco ABI/inform, etc. All these studies are related to the measuring of service quality in higher education. Findings The result of this paper reveals that SERVQUAL is the most widely accepted scale which has its dominance in the higher education setting. The paper focuses on revealing the dimensions which are used in the past studies. The paper notices a huge variation in the items as well as constructs while exploring the dimensions. Further, it is observed that many of the studies considered in this paper picked dimensions from other studies, expert opinions and factor analysis. In addition to this, it is found that different scales are proposed and checked for their reliability and validity through the confirmatory factor analysis. Few studies confirm the validity using average variance extracted (AVE), model fit values and correlations. Practical implications The study will help other researchers to get a summarised form of different dimensions used in the higher education setting. It also points out the essential and common dimensions of similar studies. Further, with different samples and geographical location, it can help us to identify how the dimension varies as we move from one part to another around the globe with different samples. Further, it formulates directions to pick correct combination of scale, administration and methods that are useful in collecting the data and getting the inference out of it under correct settings. Originality/value The summarisation of different studies will help the researchers to have a holistic view of the important studies that took place in the higher education setting.

Keep up the Good Work in Research Universities: An Importance-Performance Analysis

“…Perceived service quality has been defined as a cognitive process based on consumer perceptions of service attributes. Via a literature review of 44 papers on service quality in HE, Gupta and Kaushik (2018) found that the disconfirmation method was the most commonly employed approach for measuring service quality. Under this approach, perceived service quality is an attitude stemming from customers’ evaluation of various service quality dimensions.…”

A minőség biztosításának kihívásai a magyar felsőoktatásban

“…Így, ha nincs megfelelő mennyiségű figyelem a nyújtott szolgáltatás értékelésén és a kapott eredmények elemzésén, elképzelhető, hogy a felsőoktatási intézmény minősége ún. hígul (Chung & McLarney, 2000;Zell, 2001;Ansary, Jayashree & Malarvizhi, 2014;Gupta & Kaushik, 2018). Ebben az esetben az intézmény nem képes elmozdulni a hivatali léttől és kihasználni szolgáltatásminőségének mértékét versenyképessége javításában (Demeter & Szász, 2012; Kenesei & Kolos, 2018).…”

Investigating Service Quality Issues in Higher Educational Context

“…In order to gain competitive advantage in the fierce competition for students, HEIs are required to pay growing attention to provide the best possible service. In order to serve that need, they are forced to develop and manage a SQ assessment system (Gupta & Kaushik, 2018;Ansary et al, 2014;Chung & McLarney, 2000;Zell, 2001) utilizing institutional strengths.…”

“…Tóth et al, 2017). According to Gupta and Kaushik (2018), other key features should be highlighted as well; that is, higher education provides a unique service to each and every student, it has multiple stakeholders, it cannot be standardized and for most of the time HE does not aim at profit making. Stakeholders of the HE sector include undergraduate students, graduates, parents, university employees, labor market participants, funding bodies and foundations, scientific societies, government, society, etc.…”