*2.2. Conceptual Framework*

The concept of perception (generally referred to as social perception by most scholars) like many others in the social science disciplines has been defined in a variety of ways since it was first used. A lay man can see perception as "a particular way of viewing things that depends on one's experience and personality." Perception (from the Latin perception) is the organisation, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information, or the environment (Schacter 2012). The perceived quality construct developed with its service quality instruments, is defined as the difference between perceptions and expectations. Perception is the "process by which an individual receives, selects and interprets stimuli to form a meaningful and coherent picture of the world". In customer satisfaction and service quality dimensions, perceptions are defined as the consumer's judgement of the services and an organisation's performance. Many social psychologists have tended to develop the concept around one of its most essential characteristics: that the world around us is not psychologically uniform to all individuals. This is the fact, in all probability, that accounts for the difference in the opinions and actions of individuals/groups that are exposed to the same social phenomenon.

According to Jandt (1995), perception is unique to each person; it begins with a three-step process of selection, organisation and interpretation. It has also been found that perceptions differ with respect to the physical environment of the service settings, cultural background and differences in gender (Ndhlovu and Senguder 2002). These indicate that a clear understanding of how perceptions are formed is critical to any service business as it facilitates the formulation of strategies to manage customer perceptions of service performance. Rao and Narayana (1998) define perception as "the process whereby people select, organise, and interpret sensory stimulations into meaningful information about their work environment." To Rao and Narayana, perception is the most critical determinant of human behaviour, which leads them to imply further that there can be no behaviour without perception. Though focusing on managers in work settings, they draw attention to the fact that since there are no specific strategies for understanding the perception of others, everyone appears to be "left with his inventiveness, innovative ability, sensitiveness and introspective skills to deal with perception." Rao and Narayana (1998) share the main characteristics of the above definition. However, they emphasise that perception ranks among the "important cognitive factors of human behaviour" or psychological mechanisms that enable people to understand their environment. The details of the mental and environmental nature of perception are not of primordial important to this study. However, these literary definitions help to shed more light on the variances in perception and what may cause them.
