Do people have different expectations about
health service standards?
The previous analysis showed that there were
significant differences between participants of
different age and education in terms of the gap
between their expectations and perceptions of
quality of the health service centre. However, it is
not clear whether these differences are because of different expectations that these people had
before they arrived in the centre. As can be seen in
Table 6, we only detected differences in the
expectations of the participants in terms of age.
However, post hoc comparisons did not support
this difference. Therefore, it could be argued here
that participants share the same expectations
about how health care services should operate
along the dimensions specified by SERVQUAL Consequently, any observed differences in the
expectations–perceptions gap reflect different
evaluation of their experiences in the service (i.e.
perceptions) rather than different expectations
before they arrived in the centre. In other words,
there was a gap between expectations and perceptions
not because people arrived at the health
service with different expectations but rather
because they perceived the service differently.
These results add to the recommendations made
by Shewchuk et al.38 that the use of either the
expectation or perception scale of SERVQUAL
will be more informative and useful than the gap
difference