A measurement tool for comparing satisfaction

The assessment of satisfaction of consumers or users is a well known issue which has been dealt by a variety of methods and techniques in various fields of application: economics, marketing, pshycology, public policies, etc. In the present context a method is proposed and tested to quantify user's contentment about services of general interest starting from a suite of observed ordinal variables, which investigate different aspects of the satisfaction level, the single latent dimension. The proposed method belongs to the wide set of Nonlinear MVA techniques and it is here used to assess an homogeneous measurement tool to quantify the perceived quality of some major public utilities among European countries. Once set-up, the measurement tool has been tested to verify its validity and stability, by means of classical Bootstrap techniques. The final result is an instrument which allows to compare countries, on the basis of the overall performance of national services, but also different services and service aspects within each country