Strategies for Studying Client Satisfaction

Abstract

One way of measuring public agency effectiveness is through the criterion of client satisfaction. The use of satisfaction as an outcome variable has a long history in the organizational psychology literature and a shorter history in the development of subjective social indicators of the quality of life. In general, satisfaction levels in all areas—job, life, government agencies—are higher than anticipated by researchers and the lay public, do not yield much variation among social classes, job categories, or agency experiences, and tend to be more favorable when own experience is assessed rather than when others' experiences are assessed. Several strategies are suggested by which researchers have tried or might try to improve satisfaction studies. These include forsaking subjective outcome measures for objective outcome measures, trying to develop a “better” measure of satisfaction, using facet‐specific measures of satisfaction rather than global, general measures, using other words with similar meanings (e.g., happiness, contentment), and exploring the cognitive meaning of satisfaction for respondents. The last strategy is endorsed as a relatively untried but potentially fruitful approach.