Service quality concept in elder care houses and conceptual service quality model: Servqual application

The purposes of this research are; increasing the empathy and sensitivity of both service providers and the service buyers and their relatives, increasing the individual and organisational awareness, increasing the effectiveness of service quality at elder care centers and bringing new perspectives to the care services sector. For the first time in Turkey, the Servqual instrument is applied in elder care centers of the central government. Bringing up the service quality perceptions of elderly and introducing which of the quality dimensions of Servqual is more important and which are not for elderly are also the purposes of the study.For realising these purposes, a survey research was conducted to collect the necessary data to calculate the service quality score of the care houses. The sample of the study was determined as the elder care houses of Social Services Institution of the Central Government and surveys were conducted in 38 care houses in 16 provinces. For the analysis of the data, SPSS v.13 program was used. Reliability tests were made to control the reliability of the expectation and perception questions of the Servqual model which was translated to Turkish and adopted for elder care services, by the researcher. In order to test the significance between the means, the t-test was conducted and in order to analyze the group variables, the one-way ANOVA test was conducted.At the results, the calculated service quality score of the care houses shows that the expectations of the elderly people living in care centers are not being welcomed; and the most important quality dimension was outlined as ?reliability? and the least one is the ?empathy? dimension.