Abstract
Background and Purpose: Higher education is growing fast and every day it becomes more and more exposed to globalization processes. The aim of this study was to determine the quality gap of educational services by using a modified SERVQUAL instrument among students in Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences Methods: In this cross-sectional study, a total of 300 students were randomly selected from all studentsof Hormozgan University of Medical Science and were asked to fill a questionnaire that was designed according to SERVQUAL method. This questionnaire measures students’ perceptions and expectationsin five dimensions of service that consists of assurance, responsiveness, empathy, reliability and tangibles. The quality gap of educational services was determined based on differences between students’ perceptions and expectations.Results: The results demonstrated that in all of the five SERVQUAL dimensions, there was a negative quality gap. The least and the most negative quality gap mean were in reliability (-0.71) and responsiveness (-1.14) respectively. Also there were significant differences between perceptions and expectations of students in all of the five SERVQUAL dimensions (p<0.001).Conclusion: Negative quality gap means students’ expectations are more than their perceptions. So improvements are needed across all of the five dimensions.
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© 2006, Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.