Classifying community services: A comparison of intuitive and empirical techniques

Abstract

Public services have been studied because of their importance for community development and their usefulness as indicators of quality of life. Current work on community services, however, is limited by the lack of a system for classifying services that has both theoretical and applied usefulness. This paper compares two methods for constructing a taxonomy of community public services. Data were drawn from a 50 percent sample of Iowa communities ranging in size from 500 to 10,000 residents (N = 195). Completed questionnaires were returned by 174 city clerks who indicated which of 38 public services were available in their communities. Reliability and Guttman analyses were performed on eight intuitively developed service categories. All eight met the basic requirement of internal consistency and five met the minimal requirement for reproducibility. Factor analysis was performed to determine whether common factors occurred among the items. Seven unique factors were identified. Discussion centers on the use of community service groupings within applied and theoretical dimensions.