[ comparative study on the importance of dimensions of educational services at Zahedan university of medical sciences: faculties and students' viewpoints]

ABSTRACT

There are differences between the recognition of service providers about the importance of dimensions of services, and its real importance as viewed by service receivers. This leads to planning and decision making on quality promotion in which the views of providers are more effective than those of the customers. In such circumstances, the quality of services is reduced in the customer's viewpoint. This research aims to compare the importance of dimensions of educational service in the faculty members, and the student's viewpoints. This cross-sectional descriptive research was performed in 2004 in Zahedan University of Medical Sciences. All the faculty members and 386 students were chosen as the research subjects. A questionnaire was used for data collection. For statistic analysis' descriptive and analytic statistics were employed. Empathy was the most important dimension from student's viewpoint which was ranked as the 4th factor in faculty members' view. The faculty members declared the most important dimension to be assurance that was ranked the third in student's viewpoint. There is no dimension with the same rank among different dimensions of educational services between the students and faculty members. This leads the faculty members to advert dimensions which are less important in student's view, so this affects the quality of services from students viewpoint. Therefore, should be taken into account these differences in programming and resource allocation in order to improve the services provided, which is so important from the student's view. Moreover it seems necessary to describe the characteristics of services to the students and identify at services and what to expect from them