SERVICE QUALITY ASSESSMENT IN A GREEK HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTE

Costas Zafiropoulos,Vasiliki Vrana

doi:10.3846/1611-1699.2008.9.33-45

Abstract

Education service quality, even though it has become a major issue in higher education worldwide, in Greece it has gained attention only in the last few years. The paper analyzes how students and staff shape opinion about quality of education in a HE institute in Greece. This is one of the few analyses of the perceptions about quality of educational services, viewed both by students and staff of Higher Education Institute in Greece. The study uses the SERVQUAL instrument, adjusted in the educational context. It finds the gaps within students’ and staff's attitudes and reveals possible differences between students’ and staff's views. Gaps exist among some students’ attitudes regarding perceived and expected quality. Staff presents greater gaps than students in every SERVQUAL dimension. Although staff's scores about perceived and expected quality differentiate significantly from students’ scores, no statistically significant difference exists regarding the final SERVQUAL scores. The SERVQUAL instrument presents high reliability indices, however its validity is questioned. The issue has important strategic and managerial implications because it relates to the ability of the institution to bridge staff's and student's attitudes. Although SERVQUAL presents some limitations regarding applicability it still may be used as a complementary research instrument for assessing service quality. In the educational context SERVQUAL can be used to reveal differentiation among views of the key stakeholders, such as students and staff. Managers should take steps to ensure that both parts form a realistic view of the educational process.

Highlights

The search of quality has become an important consumer trend (Parasuraman et al 1985, 1988) and a whole industry centred on the measurement of a consumer and perceived quality satisfaction has arisen (Berry et al 1988)
In this paper we present the implementation of SERVQUAL in T.E.I. of Serres (TEIS)
Regarding instruments used for measuring service quality in higher education, Firdaus (2006b: 32) claimed “the emergence of diverse instruments of measurement such as SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al 1988), SERVPERF (Cronin and Taylor 1992) and evaluated performance (EP) (Teas 1993a, b) has contributed enormously to the development in the study of service quality”

Summary

Introduction

The search of quality has become an important consumer trend (Parasuraman et al 1985, 1988) and a whole industry centred on the measurement of a consumer and perceived quality satisfaction has arisen (Berry et al 1988). Service quality assessment in a greek higher education institute to explain the nature of service quality and the main work in the field identified two major dimensions in quality: that of the service offering, as perceived by the service provider, and that of the received service, as perceived by the guest (Nightingale 1985; Jones 1989) In this vein, Parasuraman et al (1985), developed the “gap model of service quality” and proposed SERVQUAL as an instrument to measure service quality. Higher education institutes are increasingly attracting more attention to service quality mainly due to the fact that there is a social requirement for quality evaluation in education In many countries this requirement is expressed directly through the establishment of independent quality assurance bodies, which place emphasis on students’ experience as one of the assessment criteria. The study explores the applicability of the instrument in the specific educational context, while the comparison of scores produced by the instrument finds the gaps in students’ attitudes, in staff’s attitudes and the gap between students’ and staff’s attitudes and reveals possible differences

Measuring quality in higher education

Use of the SERVQUAL in higher education

Methodology

Comparative results for staff and students

Conclussions