Edinburgh Napier University

  Notwithstanding the strategic importance of service quality to public sector reforms, the Government of Jamaica has given it no consideration in its justice reform project. Neither had anyone previously applied the service quality methodology to service delivery in the Jamaican Supreme Court. This thesis is a study of service quality in the Supreme Court civil registry in Jamaica and of the services provided to legal practitioners using the registry by clerks, administrators and registrars engaged in that registry. The aim was to identify, investigate and understand the perceptions of service quality in the registry.
The study was conducted in three stages: A pilot study, a main study and focus groups’ assessments of the findings. The main study used the SERVQUAL instrument, adapted to suit the circumstances of a court’s civil registry. The sample frame for the main study was legal practitioners working in the Kingston Metropolitan Area who were users of the civil registry. Survey methodology was used to collect data. Three focus groups of practitioners later evaluated the participants’ understanding of the items on the questionnaires. The groups supported the findings of the main study and confirmed that the service quality dimensions used in the study represented an accurate interpretation of the service quality experience of users of the registry.
The study also supports the dominant opinion in the literature that SERVQUAL and SERVPERF are both good measures of overall service quality. The findings were that practitioners in Jamaica experienced poor overall service quality in several service quality dimensions, including the areas that they considered to be most important, and that this dissatisfaction did not vary by gender or how far their place of employment was from the Supreme Court. This work confirms that the Government of Jamaica’s programme of civil justice reform is not meeting the needs of important stakeholders, such as legal practitioners, and that the emphasis of the reforms may be misplaced.