Measuring quality in services for children with an intellectual disability.

Purpose: To evaluate the application of one particular quality measurement tool, the SERVQUAL instrument, as a potential mechanism to measure quality in services for children with disabilities

Design/methodology/approach: Staff and family of children with an intellectual disability in two organisations providing specialist therapy and day completed an adapted SERVQUAL questionnaire. A total of 81 SERVQUAL questionnaires were distributed and 59 questionnaires were returned (response rate of 73 per cent).

Findings: The SERVQUAL instrument can be considered as a useful diagnostic tool to identify particular strengths and areas for improvement in services for people with disabilities as the instrument lends itself for the monitoring of the effectiveness of quality improvement initiatives over time. The findings also showed relatively high customer expectations and the organisations involved in this research are currently not meeting all of these high expectations as significant quality gaps were found in the areas of reliability and responsiveness.

Research limitations/implications: The sample size was relatively small and the measurement of quality using the SERVQUAL instrument remains a challenge, due to the conceptual and empirical difficulties.

Practical implications: The SERVQUAL instrument is probably most be attractive to service managers and funding organisations because of its ability to identify gaps in the quality of the service.

Originality/value: The tool had been used to measure quality in services for people with disabilities and the research has shown that this tool might be an important additional quality measurement tool for services.