SERVICE QUALITY SCALE DEVELOPMENT FOR HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS: THE ASIAN CONTEXT

Education has become a source of global economy. Globalization, competition, advanced technology and pressure from stakeholders have made the higher education as one of the most important subjects of twenty-first century. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are striving hard to implement different quality improvement initiatives including service quality to uplift their teaching and research standards. Service quality deals with the measurement of customer expectations and has qualities of intangibility, heterogeneity and inseparability. Indeed, several generic scales are available in the literature to measure service quality in any service sector. However, it is argued that due to its unique nature customized scale should be developed to measure service quality in higher education. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop a scale for the measurement of service quality in HEIs. The data was collected from over 600 students of a large university of Pakistan. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the data. The findings of this study support the argument that customized scales should be developed for the specific sectors like higher education for the measurement of service quality. Generally accepted five dimensions of service quality like reliability, responsiveness, tangibility, assurance and empathy are retained in the current scale. The practitioner could effectively use the scale developed in this study.