Priming and context effects in citizen satisfaction surveys

What is it about?

How do prior questions and introductory text in a citizen satisfaction survey affect later performance and satisfaction questions? This article reports on a survey experiment that randomizes which prior questions and text respondents see before answering the important questions on performance and satisfaction with public services. The results show that especially positively framed questions about the police affects later performance and satisfaction questions.

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Why is it important?

Since citizen satisfaction surveys are extensively used by governments as a means to gain insight into the performance of their public services and to report to citizens how well they are doing, it is of prime interest if there is bias in these surveys. The article shows that there is an effect of adding prior questions about the police to the survey on later questions about a diverse set of public services. This is an important challenge to the use of citizen satisfaction surveys as performance measures.