Column Actions

The purpose of this indicator is to measure the number of respondents replying that they were satisfied or very satisfied with their last experience of accessing a public service.

Governments have an obligation to provide a wide range of public services that should meet the expectations of their citizens in terms of access, responsiveness and reliability/quality. When citizens cannot afford some essential services, when their geographic or electronic access to services and information is difficult, when the services provided do not respond to their needs and are of poor quality, citizens will naturally tend to report lower satisfaction not only with these services, but also with public institutions and governments. In this regard, it has been shown that citizens’ experience with front-line public services affects their trust in public institutions. Mindful of this close connection between service provision/performance, citizen satisfaction and public trust, governments are increasingly interested in better understanding citizens’ needs, experiences and preferences to be able to provide better targeted services, including for underserved populations.

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB)

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB)

Annual

Percentage (%)

Measuring satisfaction with public services is at the heart of a citizen-centred approach to service delivery and an important outcome indicator of overall government performance. Yet while a large number of countries have experience with measuring citizen satisfaction with public services, there is also large variability in the ways national statistical offices and government agencies in individual countries collect data in this area, in terms of the range of services included, the specific attributes of services examined, question wording and response formats, among other methodological considerations. This variability poses a significant challenge for cross-country comparison of such data.

This indicator measures levels of public satisfaction with people’s last experience with public services, in the three service areas of healthcare, education and government services. This is a survey-based indicator which emphasizes citizens’ experiences over general perceptions, with an eye on measuring the availability and quality of services as they were delivered to survey respondents.

Disaggregation is by disaggregated by sex, income and place of residence (urban/rural, administrative regions).

An ‘add-on’ module: The questions for this indicator on healthcare, education and government services can be inserted into existing surveys, using these surveys’ additional batteries on demographics for subsequent disaggregation of results. This modular ‘add-on’ technique also allows for the crosstabulation of satisfaction levels with other socioeconomic variables found in the larger survey, such as the health conditions of the respondent. This enables a more comprehensive analysis of disparities in the provision of services and helps to pinpoint specific factors that influence satisfaction levels.

This indicator helps the Statistical Institute of Belize to provide a better understanding of how access to services and the quality of services differ across localities and across various demographic groups.

Since this indicator refers to people’s ‘last experience’ with public services, the indicator needs to focus on user experiences rather than on non-user perceptions. The experience of users is important, but it is equally important to understand the experiences and perceptions of those who turn elsewhere for services, or who do not access services altogether.

All the metadata shown was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.