Students with disabilities’ satisfaction with their universities’ services

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the satisfaction aspects among disabled students in some universities in the Middle East and to examine the impact of socio-demographic factors on such satisfaction with regard to the services provided by their universities. Design/methodology/approach: The sample consisted of 251 subjects from Oman, Qatar, Jordan and Yemen. Comparative means were used to examine the importance of satisfaction aspects and analysis of variance (ANOVA) as well as multi-analysis of variance (MANOVA) were used to examine the role of the socio-demographic factors in explaining the disabled students’ satisfaction. Satisfaction aspects included: social, psychological, educational, environmental and health, while the socio-demographic variables included were: country, specialization, kind of disability, gender GPA and degree of disability. Findings: The findings revealed that social satisfaction was the greatest, followed by psychological, educational, environmental and health satisfaction in order. The results of the ANOVA revealed that all socio-demographic factors impacted significantly on the satisfaction of disabled students, except gender and the degree of disability. While, the MANOVA findings reported that Jordanian and Qatari students had higher educational and psychological satisfaction than Omani and Yemeni students. Research limitations/implications: The present findings can be considered as limited and hard to generalize on all regions’ universities because the gap between them in disability services is very large. Some of universities have very good services, while the disability services of other universities are very limited or not existed. Practical implications: The findings will be helping the educators and administrative people to offer more services to disabled students. Originality/value: This is the first comparative study in the Middle East area.