Assessing University Students’ Satisfaction with Service Delivery: Implications for Educational Management (Published)
The study investigated students’ satisfaction with service delivery in universities in Akwa Ibom and Cross River States, Nigeria. Five areas of service delivery namely library, health, transportation, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and hostel services were considered in the study. The extent to which students’ satisfaction with service delivery varied with types of institution was also examined. Survey research design was adopted for the study. Five research questions and one hypothesis guided the study. The population of the study comprised all the undergraduate students in four universities in the study area. Simple random sampling technique was used to draw a sample of 1466 (915 from federal owned and 551 from state owned universities) students for the study. The instrument for data collection was titled “Students’ Satisfaction with Service Delivery Questionnaire (ASSSDQ)”. The reliability of the instrument using Cronbach Alpha method was 0.85. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequencies and percentages) and independent t-test. The hypothesis was tested at 0.05 level of significance. Findings obtained revealed that majority of the respondents indicated dissatisfaction with library, hostel, as well as Information and communication services, while they showed moderate satisfaction with health and transport services. It was also found that students’ satisfaction with service delivery in terms of library and health services significantly differed by their institution’s affiliation, while they did not show significant difference in their satisfaction with transport, ICT and hostel services. Recommendations for improvement in service delivery in universities were made one of which being that all services that contributes to students’ academic life in the universities are delivered to an acceptable and satisfactory standard.
Keywords: Educational Management, Service delivery, Students’ Satisfaction, Universities