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

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.