Adolescents and Leisure Activities: The Impact of Expectation and Experience on Service Satisfaction

Abstract

Although service quality has been found to be a key concept for organizations, it has rarely been applied to the leisure activities of adolescents. Therefore, in this research we examined the relationships among adolescents' expectations of quality, perceptions of quality of actual experiences, and satisfaction with those experiences. We also examined the relationship between expectation and actual experience in terms of the adolescents' satisfaction. A privately owned theme park in the middle of Taiwan was chosen as the location for the study and 392 high school students were recruited to take part. The results of regression analysis showed that adolescents' service expectations directly affect both their perceptions of actual experiences and their satisfaction. In addition, it was found that the adolescents' perceptions of actual experiences mediated between their service quality expectations and their satisfaction.