Antecedents and consequences of service quality in a higher education context. A qualitative research approach
| Date | 25 January 2013 |
| Pages | 70-95 |
| Published date | 25 January 2013 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09684881311293070 |
| Author | Parves Sultan,Ho Yin Wong |
| Subject Matter | Education |
Antecedents and consequences of
service quality in a higher
education context
A qualitative research approach
Parves Sultan
School of Management and Marketing, Central Queensland University,
Rockhampton, Australia
Ho Yin Wong
Deakin Graduate School of Business, Deakin University,
Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to report on the perception of students in regard to critical
antecedents, dimensions and consequences of service quality with an aim to develop a theoretical
model in the context of a university in Australia.
Design/methodology/approach – This research used focus group discussions with 19 students
who had been studying in undergraduate and postgraduate level programs at an Australian
university.
Findings – The findings show that the critical antecedents to perceived service quality are
information and past experience. There are three aspects of perceived service quality, namely,
academic, administrative and facilities. Student satisfaction and student trust are found to have direct
and positive relationships with perceived service quality as consequences; and brand performance and
behavioural intention are found to have indirect relationships with perceived service quality mediated
through satisfaction and trust.
Originality/value – This paper found three separate themes and their relationships with service
quality in the context of a university. These themes are: information, past experience and brand
performance. Perceived service quality was found playing an important role in this theoretical model.
The model provides a good explanation of university brand performance and students’ behavioural
intentions.
Keywords Higher education,Service quality, Information, Pastexperience, Satisfaction, Trust,
Brand performance,Behavioural intention, Australia, Students
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
A number of studies in service quality have enriched the services marketing domain
over the last three decades. Most of these studies have concentrated their findings on
the dimensions of service quality across industries, cultures and firms. These studies
developed scales to gauge quality. Amongst these, the widely used scales are the
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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The authors wish to thank the Editor and the reviewers for their valuable comments. An earlier
version of this paper was published in the working paper series of the Central Queensland
University, Australia (Sultan, P. and Wong, H.Y. (2010e)).
QAE
21,1
70
Received 25 June 2011
Revised 6 February 2012
12 April 2012
29 August 2012
Accepted 30 October 2012
Quality Assurance in Education
Vol. 21 No. 1, 2013
pp. 70-95
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0968-4883
DOI 10.1108/09684881311293070
SERVQUAL conceptualised on the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm
(Parasuraman et al., 1985, 1988) and the SERVPERF concept ualised on the
perception-only concept (Cronin and Taylor, 1992, 1994). Only a few studies
(Dabholkar et al., 2000; Gounaris et al., 2003) have focused attention on the antecedents
of service quality. In terms of consequences of service quality in commercial
enterprises, several models have been developed in the service quality literature (Cassel
and Eklo
¨f, 2001; Cronin et al., 2000; Fornell et al., 1996).
The dimensions of service quality have varied according to the thought of two
different schools, the Nordic (Gro
¨nroos, 1982, 1984) school and the American school
(Parasuraman et al., 1985, 1988), by industries (Lee et al., 2000), by service types
(Babakus and Boller, 1992), by culture (Furrer et al., 2000) or even by providers or firms
in the same industry (Abdullah, 2005; Sureshchandar et al., 2001; Zeithaml et al., 1993).
The dimensional approach of service quality provided an understanding of quality
dimensions and their relevant attributes. The antecedent framework, in contrast,
provided insights into how consumers viewed service quality as a whole and ho w this
view contributed in predicting their behaviour (Dabholkar et al., 2000). Consequences
of service quality vary across study perspectives. For example, economic value may
play a significant role as a consequence of service quality for a commercial product.
However, this might have little significance as a consequence of service quality for
emergency services when compared to emotional value.
Although universities and commercial enterprises are located in two different
sectors, a number of studies (see, for example, Brown and Mazzarol, 2009; Chitty and
Soutar, 2004) used the European Customer Satisfaction Index (ECSI) model in the
context of higher education. These studies did not find cause and effect relationships of
some of the variables in the context of the higher education sector. One of the reasons
for this was that the ECSI model was developed for testing nationwide customer
satisfaction levels across commercial industries.
As higher education provision is a service and students are expected to fund their
educational expenses, it would seem appropriate that universities make a shift from
being product-led, i.e. relying on the product to sell, towards a more “customer-led”
approach (Angell et al., 2008). It was found in the current literature that, when making
an uncertain and high-risk decision choosing a university, the student looked for
evidence of service quality (Donaldson and McNicholas, 2004). This confirms the
importance of service quality in a university context. The institution will ultimately be
at a disadvantage due to ignorance of the competitive nature of attracting students and
measuring service quality (Angell et al., 2008). Therefore, a marketing approach to the
higher education domain may provide an important outcome. The present paper
explores student perceptions of antecedents, dimensions and consequences of service
quality in the context of a university in Australia with the aim of establishing a
theoretical model. The paper is organised as follows. The next section presents a
review of current literature. This is followed by the methodology, discussion, and
research hypotheses sections. The final part of this paper discusses conclusion, and
some implications, limitations and future research directions.
Literature review
Most of the service quality literature in the last few decades focused on the dimensional
approach. As a result, a number of measures evolved; namely the Gro
¨nroos model
Service quality in
ahigher
education context
71
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