Service Quality And Determinants Of Customer Satisfaction In Hospitals: Turkish Experience

Abstract

Service quality has increasingly been the subject of research in recent years. Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry presented and tested a generic model SERVQUAL to measure the perceived quality of a service. James Carman adapted and applied this instrument for use in the hospital industry. In this study, we use the instrument developed by Carman to collect data from the hospitals in Turkey. The purpose of the study is to examine the important criteria for measuring service quality in the health care industry in Turkey. The relationship between customer satisfaction and serqual measures are investigated for this purpose. In our study customer satisfaction measured by three criteria by asking customers; their future purchase intention, how they evaluate overall service quality and how they see overall quality of the hospital. Service quality was measured by the difference between perceived service and expected service and rated on a seven point Likert scale. Serqual measures consist of 6 criteria; tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, courtesy, and empathy. The techniques of factor analysis and the logistic regression models are used to investigate the relationships. Like the linear regression analysis, most of the usual statistical methods assume that the residuals, or errors, must follow a normal distribution. If they are not the methods should not be used. Unlike ordinary linear regression, logistic regression does not assume that the dependent variable or the error terms are distributed normally. Also, it doesn’t assume that the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable is linear. Logistic regression is a variation of ordinary regression which is used when the dependent variable is a categorical variable. The results of our analysis confirm that while tangibility, reliability, courtesy and empathy are significant for customer satisfaction, responsiveness and assurance are not.