Citizens evaluate public services: a critical overview of statistical methods for analysing user satisfaction

Abstract

Public enterprises may be unaware of their performance in providing services. In situations where citizens cannot switch to other providers or reduce the use of the service, the evaluation of users’ satisfaction becomes a very important topic. At the same time, this is a tricky task, given the particular nature of this variable. Appropriate statistical methods to assess and explain the level of satisfaction are useful tools to face these issues. In this paper, we analyse some of these methods and their potential in giving advice to public managers to improve citizens’ satisfaction.

Keywords:

• services of general interest
• statistical indicators
• Rasch models
• nonlinear PCA
• Eurobarometer data

JEL Classifications:

• C43
• D18
• H40
• L88

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the CIRIEC workshop “The Future of Public Enterprise”, 14–16 February 2013, Berlin, and we thank those who were present for helpful discussion. We thank the editor, the associate editor and three reviewers for their helpful suggestions on improving the paper. We are also grateful to Stefania Scuderi for competent research assistance.

Notes

1. Multilevel models have been extensively used in public service satisfaction analysis, especially in medical care (see, for example, Sixma, Spreeuwenberg and van der Pasch 1998). But in general, they are used only with satisfaction scores as dependent variables, not with synthetic measures of satisfaction.

2. With “quality”, in this case, we refer to the question in the EB survey questionnaire and not to the intrinsic quality detected by the RM item parameters.

3. This regulation index (Conway and Nicoletti 2006) is a synthetic indicator comprising various measures of regulation in competition, among which entry regulation measures focusing on terms and conditions for third-party access to a given market, indicators for public ownership, indicators for vertical integration and indicators for market structure.