Samenvatting

The changes that have taken place in higher education in the last decade, such as output-based funding, global competition, and the marketization of higher education, call for a re-focus on the establishment of bonds between students and their educational institution. Previous studies have emphasized that teacher–student relationships should be a focal point in the educational process (e.g., Wubbels & Brekelmans, 2005). Still, research in educational psychology is mostly limited to student–teacher relationships. Students have multiple and ongoing interactions with many different people from their university, contributing to their educational experience. Besides their teachers, students also have contact with other faculty or staff working at their university, of instance, the study counselors or advisors for their program of study, student psychologists, members of an exam board, janitors, librarians, and receptionists.
Furthermore, educational researchers investigating student relationships have mainly focused on primary or secondary education (e.g., Roorda et al., 2011, 2017). Although their research findings are important for gaining insight into educational processes, the instruments used in these studies are not always applicable in all educational settings. More specifically, higher education differs from other educational contexts regarding students’ involvement and participation (Leenknecht et al., 2020). In primary and secondary education, the student–teacher relationship exists between a child and an adult; in higher education, the relationships are formed between adults (Hagenauer & Volet, 2014) The attention paid to student–faculty relationships in primary and secondary education (e.g., Roorda et al., 2011, 2017) did not answer the question of how to establish and maintain positive relationships between students and their educational faculty/staff in higher education.

Building and maintaining (long-lasting) relationships with stakeholders are the cornerstones of relationship management. Underlining previous research on the use of relationship and services management in higher education (Ng & Forbes, 2009), these ideas are now more often applied in the higher education context (e.g., T. Gibbs & Kharouf, 2020; Yousaf et al., 2020). In these studies, education is treated as a service. Drawing from social exchange theory (e.g., Homans, 1961), educational service in higher education is based on the exchange between students and their educational institution. When a service consists of high-involvement interactions (Bloemer & De Ruyter, 1999) as educational service in higher education does, it is important to focus on how higher education students, as the primary stakeholders (Bunce et al., 2017), perceive the educational service. The outcomes of the educational learning process depend on how students perceive the educational exchange. The gap model by Parasuraman et al. (1991) is often used to investigate possible quality gaps between stakeholders’ expectations and perceptions, and the gap with organizations in services research (Zeithaml et al., 2009). The first steps in the “gap analysis” is to ask the main stakeholders for their quality expectations and perceptions. Therefore, the customers/recipients of the service, in this case, students, play a central role. These ideas formed the starting point for our research.

In this thesis, we examined how students perceive the quality of their relationships with their educational faculty/staff, that is, relationship quality. As indicated by Osobajo and Moore (2017), definitions of relationship quality vary, which is mainly caused by the specific context under study. Osobajo and Moore provided a general description of relationship quality: “how healthy a relationship is based on the evaluation or assessment of the parties within that relationship” (Osobajo & Moore, 2017, p. 4). The relationship quality instrument used in this thesis was a new approach in the educational literature measuring the quality of relationships between students and their educational faculty and staff. The construct was taken to consist of five relationship quality dimensions based on relationship management research (Roberts et al., 2003). We adapted the instrument to fit the context of higher education. It included trust in benevolence, which refers to the extent to which students believe faculty/staff are concerned about their welfare, have intentions and motives beneficial to them, and avoid acting in a way that will result in negative outcomes for students. We also included trust in honesty, which represents the trust students have in a university’s credibility as represented by faculty/ staff, and affective commitment, which refers to students’ willingness to belong or be connected to their university (i.e., their faculty/staff). Satisfaction was also included, referring to cumulative student satisfaction with the overall quality of the student– faculty relationships, representing students’ cognitive and affective evaluations based on their personal experiences across all educational service encounters. Finally, we included affective conflict, which can be seen as a negative indicator of relationship quality (Roberts et al., 2003). The affective conflict that students perceive, evident in such reactions as irritation, frustration, and anger, will lower the levels of perceived relationship quality.
To create an in-depth understanding of how students perceived the overall quality of their relationships with their university, we asked students to respond to questions in which we referred to the quality of relationships with all educational faculty/staff, thus including all members of the educational faculty and staff. If positive, these relationships could be beneficial for higher education institutions in terms of students’ involvement, both during and after graduation.