| Abstract: | Expectations disconfirmation and expectations anchoring aretwo increasingly influential approaches to understanding individuals'satisfaction and dissatisfaction with public services. Thisarticle assesses hypotheses from these approaches for two localpublic services in England provided by local authorities: overallpublic services from the authority and household refuse collectionservices. Consistent with the expectations disconfirmation hypothesis,performance minus expectations is positively related to thepredicted probability of satisfaction and negatively relatedto predicted probability of dissatisfaction for both types ofservice. However, the relationship is not symmetric betweensatisfaction and dissatisfaction, the predicted probabilityof dissatisfaction falls more rapidly than the predicted probabilityof satisfaction rises as performance increasingly meets expectations.The expectations anchoring hypotheses receive support for dissatisfactionand partial support for satisfaction, with a general expectationsrelationship evident for overall services but only evident inthe case of very high expectations for waste services. The findingssuggest that expectations need to be taken into account alongsidemore conventionally understood factors in using satisfactionsurveys as a performance measure, especially if performanceis not potentially to be overestimated in areas with low expectationsor underestimated in areas with high expectations. Managingexpectations, as well as perceived performance, may be an effectivestrategy for local authorities to raise satisfaction, althoughthis may not be seen as desirable. |
