Higher Education (HE) was taken as the research setting and the objectives of the study were
to examine the impacts of service quality on one particular outcome measure, namely,
willingness to recommend which was seen as most relevant to the context. Positive word-ofmouth
has been shown to be one of the most important factors in attracting international
students to higher education (Allen and Higgins, 1994) as well as being generally considered
to be an important outcome in any service context. Moreover, because HE is for most
consumers a one-off purchase, behavioural outcomes like repeat purchased are largely
inapplicable.