Abstract:
There has been a widely reported view that the quality of service performance
reporting by New Zealand universities is in need of improvement. The purpose of this
study is to measure the quality of service performance reporting as provided in the
Statement of Service Performance by the university sector of New Zealand in the years
2000, 2002 and 2003. A new methodology is developed that complements existing
methodologies employed in research addressing university reporting, specifically the
Modified Accountability Disclosure Index (Coy et al. 1993) and the Performance
Accountability Index (Coy and Dixon 2002). The Information Accessibility Index
introduced here measures the clarity rather than the content of presentation. The
rankings afforded by different indices are sensitive to the metric adopted. Future
research might further explore the development of alternative methods to further
exploit context specific differences between countries.
