Antecedents of satisfaction among university students from people’s Republic of China in Malaysia

Abstract

This study was carried out to investigate the levels, degrees, and relationships of cultural orientation, adjustment, service quality, and satisfaction among university students from P.R. China studying in Malaysia. The numerical data was obtained through the CASS questionnaire survey, which was conducted from June 2013 to July 2013 at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (Johor) and Sunway University (Selangor). As the research instrument of this study, the CASS questionnaire was a modification from Samarasekera (2013), Reynolds (2010), and Danjuma’s (2012) works, and all the questions were set into the fifth-point Likert-scale format. The questionnaire was distributed to 63 China students in UTM and 54 China students in SU. The data obtained had good internal consistency, as indicated by the reliability analysis because all Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients were greater than 0.65. The result of normality test showed that the data was normally distributed, as indicated by the statistics of skewness and kurtosis coefficients as well as the Q-Q plots. More precisely, the former indicators had their values falling within ±3 for all dimensions of each variable, and the latter had depicted that the data points were close to the regression line. For cultural orientation, the pertaining formula for VSM 94 were used to assess the dimensional index value scores. Result indicated both UTM and SU students had low power distance and were primarily individualistic, feminine, and short-terms oriented. However, a contradicting result was found in the uncertainty avoidance dimension where the UTM’s respondents had shown a high uncertainty avoidance preference and that of SU was comparatively lower. For adjustment, all dimensional scores were greater than 3, the midpoint of the five point scale, which meant that the respondents could adjust to their lives in Malaysia. The results showed a negative gap scores for all five dimensions in UTM and SU. For the correlation analysis, a positive correlation between cultural orientation, adjustment, service quality, and satisfaction as a whole.