Exploring students' perception of postgraduate research service quality

Abstract

Given that education is a service, the postgraduate (PG) education environment has become increasingly competitive, and whilst the service quality perceptions of undergraduates have been extensively measured, similar postgraduate-based research, especially in South Africa, has been negligible. Furthermore, although the development of an ideal instrument to measure higher education service quality has also occupied the minds of several researchers over the years, not much has been achieved in the area of postgraduate research (PG) service quality. This paper presents the results of the assessment of the PG students' perception of research service quality by surveying the 2011 cohort of graduating postgraduates of one of the top five research universities in South Africa by using a specially developed postgraduate service quality measurement instrument (PSQUAL). By adapting the SERVQUAL instrument (Parasuraman, Berry & Zeithaml 1988), the PREQ (Drennan 2008) and SREQ (Ginns, Marsh, Behnia, Cheng & Scalas 2009), a 26-item postgraduate research service quality assessment instrument known as PGSQUAL was developed, validated and administered electronically to a population of 816 Master's and doctoral graduates.