Dyesebel L. Chinayo, PhD
School of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences
email: dchinayo@yahoo.com
Abstract
Service quality and clients’ satisfaction are important for all business entities and educational institutions for them to know how to measure these constructs from the clients’ perspective to better understand their needs and hence satisfy them. Service quality is crucial because it leads to higher clients’ satisfaction which in turn maintain loyalty and continuous purchase towards profit. This research used an enhanced SERQUAL instrument contextualized to the services offered by the Graduate School of the University of Baguio. The questionnaire covered the five generic dimensions of service quality and added education and research factors. The reliability of the data gathering tool by Cronbach Alpha was confirmed (r=.9) which focused on the agreeability and satisfaction of the students with the different dimensions of service quality. Ninety-seven (97) graduate students voluntarily participated from the 204 total enrollees of the first semester of SY 2017-2018. Aside from descriptive and inferential statistics, Gap 5 was also used to analyze the data. Students very much agreed to the service quality expected to be offered by the graduate school and likewise, they were very much satisfied with them. Age group is a factor while gender is not. However, considering the different dimensions of service quality, empathy and research factor are affected by gender at 5% level of significance. There was a definite gap five score indicating that expectations were not met and hence, service performance was not good. Therefore, service quality performance needs further improvements to increase satisfaction. The satisfaction of students on service quality offered by the graduate school was influenced by their expectations on service quality (R2 = .5868). The regression model fits the data (p < .05).
Keywords: expectations, satisfaction, service quality, performance, servqual
| Published January 15, 2019 |
Issue UB RJ Vol. 42, No. 1 2018 |
Source: UB Research Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1 January-June 2018
