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Priming and context effects in citizen satisfaction surveys
Author(s) -
Hjortskov Morten
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
public administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.313
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1467-9299
pISSN - 0033-3298
DOI - 10.1111/padm.12346
Subject(s) - priming (agriculture) , context (archaeology) , perception , affect (linguistics) , survey data collection , order (exchange) , psychology , cognition , data collection , social psychology , public sector , public relations , political science , sociology , business , geography , social science , statistics , botany , germination , mathematics , archaeology , communication , finance , neuroscience , law , biology
Citizen satisfaction surveys are used extensively throughout the public sector to assess the performance of public services and to inform decision‐makers. Recent research points to cognitive biases that may occur in citizens’ perceptions of performance of public services, but we know little about possible biases in the collection of these data. This shortcoming is addressed by investigating the priming and context effects that can arise from the structure of citizen surveys—for example, from the question order in the survey. Two independent experimental studies find that prior positively framed questions about police services affect subsequent satisfaction evaluations of other local public services. However, an informational prime about crime and unrelated questions about family‐life satisfaction have little effect on the subsequent satisfaction evaluations. The results show that citizen evaluations of public services can be influenced by irrelevant context effects, but this may depend on the topics of prior questions.