Introduction
Public administration is one of the first fields that take care of citizens’ interests and discontents which may appear. There are many investigations which aim at comparing and evaluating the worth of importance-performance analysis with the help of which it is possible to define the major needs of citizens based on the activities of the local government.
Gress van Ryzin and Stephen Immerwahr are the authors of the article that is published in Public Administration journal and devoted to the two approaches by means of which the above-mentioned importance-performance analysis may be learnt.
The point is that the chosen approaches demonstrate different results, it means that the stated importance approach and statistically derived importance approach have different impacts on the field of public administration and it is very important to consider citizens’ survey data all the time if the analysis of local government services take place.
The main purpose of this article is to investigate deeply the approaches which help to understand citizens’ satisfaction and to define the services which are more appropriate under the particular government.
Body
At the beginning of the article, the authors admit that the already offered investigations have dealt with the importance-performance analysis and the two approaches of stated and derived importance. However, the quality of the comparison is not credible, this is why some improvements are required.
With the help of opportunities available, it seems to be possible to contrast the approaches under consideration by means of the stimulation of the citizens’ satisfaction that is resulted from the current activities demonstrated by the local government. To achieve better and clearer results, it is necessary to attract as many participants as possible and investigate thoroughly their attitude to the changes around.
The quality of the research described in the article may be checked: the figures offered by the authors and the evaluation of the responses from the survey become one of the most reliable evidence in this work. It is not for the author to provide the reader with the numbers. What they want is to introduce the achievements and describe how they influence the sphere of public administration.
As it has been already mentioned, importance-performance analysis aims at evaluating citizens’ satisfaction from the activities of the local government. The activities are predetermined by the current conditions which are of changeable nature, this is why to get clear results, new investigations are required.
The investigations offered in the article under analysis prove that public administration has to take a number of steps. The derived importance approach undergoes some doubts and misunderstandings based on unclear indicators of length and costs of the survey. And the stated importance approach seems to be simplest for the reader to rely on.
Conclusion
In general, the article by van Ryzin and Immerwahr plays an important role in the sphere of public administration and the evaluation of the conditions under which citizens have to live. It is not always possible to choose the most appropriate approach and evaluate the data gathered.
The authors of this article prove that several proper investigations and the attention to each aspect of the importance-performance analysis may result in a successful identification of the approach that will be accepted by the public and used to improve the ratings of citizens’ satisfaction that is based on the activities of the local government.