SERVQUAL: A Measurement Approach for Quality of Internet Services in a Nigerian University
Abstract
As universities strive to be among the best in the world the Quality of Internet Services (QoIS) they offer remain a major determinant to rank them globally. However, within the context of the Nigerian University, much is yet to be known about the QoIS on a daily basis. What exists is the measurement of the quality of service of universities’ websites, using descriptive statistics with either WebQUAL or an adapted version of the SERVQUAL model. This paper therefore, applied the SERVQUAL model with a different approach that included the Gap analysis theoretic and inferential statistics to investigate the QoIS of a university’s Internet infrastructure, which include the hardware, software, and other Internet and human resources from the perspective of those who use and maintain them. The qualitative and quantitative measurement theoretic was applied using the questionnaire and interview methods to elicit data from randomly and purposively selected users and administrators respectively. Data from a focus group discussion also form part of the data that was used to validate the patterns of users’ expectation and perception in the user log of 65,000 log items that were collected over three months. The final analysis of result, showed that user’s expectation(s) about the QoIS was low. In future, the potential value of the QoIS of U-INET will be investigated in a longitudinal study with a much larger sample size.
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