Measuring Students’ Perceived Higher Education Service Quality: A Segmental Approach to Scale Development and Validation

Abstract

The approach of developing a generic scale to measure service quality found in quality measurement literature has long been overlooking the fact that marketing in almost all industries has adopted a segmental approach. A generic scale may not provide sufficient insights to the determinants of customers’ satisfaction or quality evaluation. This paper proposes a segmental approach to develop and validate the quality measurement instrument. The study is carried out in two phases to extract and validate the dimensions impacting the students’ perception of higher education service quality. The segmental approach is used to validate the dimensions across different segments of the students. The results suggest that not all dimensions of perceived service quality are valid for all student segments. Further, implications of this research are also discussed.