Who ought to receive what? An instrument to assess a community's preferred strategy for allocating leisure service resources

Abstract

All are likely to agree that resources for public leisure services should be allocated equitably, that is, fairly. Equity is a pseudo-cognate term in that many who use it assume that everyone has the same intuitive definition of it. This is a fallacious assumption. There are multiple and diverse interpretations of what is meant by equity. Since interpretations reflect value systems, they are likely to vary across communities. This article develops an instrument that will enable professionals to identify the preferred interpretation in their community. It proposes a taxonomy of five broad equity perspectives with nine operationalisations of the construct. A classic scale development procedure was used to measure the nine operational strategies. The empirical procedures failed to develop measures for two of the operationalisations but they verified the reliability, dimensionality and validity of 23 items measuring the remaining seven equity operationalisations: Economically Disadvantaged, Equality, Taxes Paid, Direct Price, Efficiency, Advocacy and Professional Judgement.

Keywords:

• equity
• allocation
• resources
• distribution
• public services
• scale development