دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تعیین کیفیت خدمات سرویس های اتوبوس شهر بر اساس درک و انتظار کاربران - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

This study aims to find out the service quality of the city bus service based on users’ perceptions and expectations of the service. The results of this study show that both perceptions and expectations of the passengers’ are important to estimate the service quality. To collect the passengers’ perceptions and expectations data, a questionnaire survey has been conducted and the respondents are asked to rate some qualitative attributes of the city bus service as per their perceptions and their minimum expectations from the service. Data has been analyzed by a combination of statistical tools comprising of factor analysis, linear regression analysis, and structural equation modeling to find out the latent factors which affect users’ perception and expectation. From these analysis four latent factors namely safety, comfort, accessibility, and timely performance have been extracted along with their perceived and expected values. Using the percentage differences of the perceived and expected values, a level of service (LOS) scale has been established to find out the service level of the city bus service. The range of this LOS scale varies from LOS 1 to LOS 5 depicting best to worst service quality. It is found that, safety, comfort, and timely performance fall under LOS 3 group while accessibility falls under LOS 2 group. Based on the results of the study, some recommendations have been made to improve the service quality of the bus service.

5. Conclusion

The objective of the study is to determine the importance of passengers’ expectations on the overall performance of the city bus service and to estimate the service levels of all the performance indicators representing the service quality of the city bus service on the basis of passengers’ perceptions and expectations. To achieve these objectives, data were collected through questionnaire survey and analysis of the data is conducted through suitable statistical measures.

It is found through the questionnaire survey that the passengers are very much unhappy with the service quality of the bus service. They also stated that if the service quality of the city bus service is improved up to their expectation then they will avail bus service instead of private vehicles and other paratransit modes. Therefore, their minimum expectation from city bus service is also collected through questionnaire survey. It is found that the collected questionnaire data is highly correlated. To analyze the questionnaire data and to understand their correlations, factor analysis has been conducted for both the perception and expectation data. Factor analysis determines that the correlated perception data are highly affected by the four latent factors namely safety, comfort, accessibility and timely performance. Factor analysis also determines the key identifying factors for the expectation data and they are expected safety, expected comfort, expected accessibility and expected timely performance. These perception and expectation factors are the latent factors and the factor scores from the respective analysis are the indicators of these variable. But these factor score values are reported in different units and hence they are not comparable with the observed variables and they are also not easily understandable. Therefore, these factor score values need to be converted into the same unit as of the observed variable so that they can be made easily comparable with each other and the observed variables. In this context, the difference between the perception factors and expectation factors indicate dissatisfaction of the passengers from the city bus service.