Immigrant population’s satisfaction with Social Services: does the frequency of attendance with Social Services play a role?

Author(s):

Agustin Godás Otero(submitting)Mar Lorenzo Moledo(presenting)Murillo Ánxela

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

09. Assessment, Evaluation, Testing and Measurement

Format:

Paper

Session Information

09 SES 12 C, Current Issues in Assessments and Evaluations

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-05

09:00-10:30

Room:

B009 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Jennifer Lorenz

Contribution

Evaluation is an essential element when assessing the quality of a service, product or program, being a reliable indicator and a guarantee of efficiency and effectiveness (Díaz Herráiz and Rodríguez Martín, 2002). Thus, we understand the evaluation of Social Services as a part integrated into the general process of quality management. This facilitates decision making, so that it could: first, ensure proper distribution of economic resources as a basis for making budgetary decisions; secondly, measure the degree of suitability and effectiveness of the services rendered and interventions performed, revealing the obtained results; and, finally, test the intervention theories and methods.

So that evaluation could really be useful to the quality management process, it is necessary starting from a model in which, as several authors pointed out (see Gómez Serra, 2004; Panchón and Iglesias, 2002), the elements of technical quality are combined with those relating to the quality perceived by users.

Thus, the commitment to quality should be a shared responsibility not only by the institution at an internal level, but also by the users of the services. In fact, the four components essential for setting up a system which ensures Social Services of efficient quality, according to Giménez-Bertomeu, Domènech-López, Lillo-Beneyto y Lorenzo-García (2012), are as follows: workers, team leaders, institution and users.

This paper[1] is focused on users, and particularly on immigrant users, to analyze their satisfaction with Social Services and tosee whether the frequency of attendance plays a role in their evaluation.

The time it takes users to receive benefits from Social Services is an element that has a direct impact on the perception of its quality. We know that these perceptions are highly variable over time (Nair, 2009), which is why it is necessary not to measure the perceived quality immediately after the service request, but when the user makes the decision of using it again. It is assumed that at that specific time, the person’s perceptions of quality are already formed and, keeping them in mind, he/she could decide whether to use the service or not, or choose other offers.

To analyze usersatisfaction, we started from the model developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1985, 1988, 1993, 1994). More specifically, this model is based on the premise that all service users have a prior expectation of quality of the service they are offered, and the difference between that expectation and the perception which is subsequently formed is called gap; this gap is exactly where the opportunity to improve services lies in (Igami, 2005).

[1] This work is supported by a research project funded through a competitive call by Xunta de Galicia, The quality of Social Services perceived by immigrant users and professional teams: evaluation and social and educational consequences (10PXIB211120PR).

Method

Participants The research study involved a total of 795 foreign users of Community Social Services within 29 municipalities. They are mainly young women, from South American and African countries, who are married, with children, high school graduates and do not work outside the home. They seek these services monthly (23.5%) or half-yearly (23.6%). Instrument We designed a questionnaire that was administered throughout the year 2012, consisting of the following sections: - Social and demographic questions: a total of 22 questions on their personal biography and their level of contact with Social Services, developed by our research team. Specifically, to work with the variable frequency of attendance with Social Services we decided recoding it in three response alternatives: daily or weekly attendance (level 1), biweekly or monthly attendance (level 2), and quarterly or half-yearly attendance (level 3). - A scale adapted from the SERVQUAL Scale (Parasuraman et al., 1988): it consisted of 18 items grouped into the following sections: Reliability (5 items); Responsibility (3 items); Safety (3 items); Empathy (4 items); and Tangibles (3 items). These five dimensions explore users’ perception, defined as the estimation made by them about the way the institution, the city council in this case, provides services according to the evaluation made when they require the services in question. Responses were displayed in a scalar form, with the following numerical correspondence: (5) strongly agree, (4) somewhat agree, (3) neither agree nor disagree, (2) somewhat disagree, and (1) strongly disagree. The registered reliability indices are appropriate for both the full scale and each of the subscales. - We also included a general question about satisfaction/dissatisfaction with Social Services developed by our research team and formulated in a scalar form according to the following criteria: (5) very satisfied, (4) somewhat satisfied, (3) neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, (2) somewhat dissatisfied, and (1) very dissatisfied. This question, in a factor analysis carried out on the full scale, appears independently in a structure made up of two factors explaining 63.46% of the variance: the first factor (57.52% of the variance), consisting of the dimensions of reliability, responsibility, safety and empathy; and the second factor (5.94% of the variance), consisting of the general question of satisfaction (with a specific weight of .61) and the dimension of tangibles.

Expected Outcomes

Starting from the SERVQUAL model, we found that time or frequency of attendance with Social Services is a very important variable with respect to users’ satisfaction. In fact, the constraints of these judgments are very different depending on the period of analysis, obtaining a different relationship framework every time. Thus, the opinion of those who seek these services daily or weekly could be summarized in the following sentence: "Social Services professionals are trained people who understand my needs and whom I can rely on." The associations between the dimensions of empathy, safety, tangibles and reliability stand out in this case. However, when we are dealing with biweekly or monthly attendance, the dimensions that determine satisfaction have a different nature since the associations occur between the dimensions of empathy, responsibility and reliability. The sentence that could sum up this feeling of satisfaction would be: "The Social Services workers pay attention to my problems." The evaluations of people who are the least likely to seek Social Services are scattered along the five dimensions that make up the scale (empathy, safety, tangibles, responsibility and reliability) and the importance of the associations is not as great as in the two above-mentioned groups, except for the one registered between the dimensions of safety, reliability and empathy, which could be summarized by saying that "Social Services workers comfort me because when they attend me, they always do what they promised."

References

Díaz Herráiz, E. & Rodríguez Martín, V. (2002). La evaluación en Servicios Sociales. In T. Fernández García & A. Ares Parra (Coords.), Servicios Sociales: Dirección, gestión y planificación (pp. 237-264). Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Giménez-Bertomeu, V.M.; Domènech-López, & Lillo-Beneyto, A. & Lorenzo-García, J. (2012): La calidad en los servicios sociales de atención primaria desde la perspectiva de las personas usuarias. Portularia, XII, extra, 61-71. Gómez Serra, M. (2004). Evaluación de los Servicios Sociales. Barcelona: Gedisa. Igami, M.P. (2005). El uso del SERVQUAL en la verificación de la calidad de los servicios de unidades de información: el caso de la biblioteca del Ipen. Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología, 28(2), 177-191. Nair, T.P. (2009). Calidade percibida e actitudes hacia o tratamento na rede asistencial do Plan de Galicia sobre Drogas. Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Trabajo de Investigación Tutelado). Panchón y Iglesias, C. (2002). La gestión de la calidad en la acción socioeducativa. Educación Social: Revista de Intervención Socioeducativa, 21, 10-24. Parasuraman, A.; Zeithaml, V.A. & Berry, L.L. (1985). A conceptual model of Service Quality: Its implications for future research. Journal of Marketing, 28 (1), 41-50. Parasuraman, A.; Zeithaml, V.A. & Berry, L.L. (1988). The service quality puzzle. Business Horizons, 31 (5), 34-35. Parasuraman, A.; Zeithaml, V.A. & Berry, L.L. (1993). More on improving service quality measurement. Journal of Retailing, 69(1), 140-147. Parasuraman, A.; Zeithaml, V.A. & Berry, L.L. (1994). Reassessment of expectations as a comparison standard in measuring service quality. Journal of Retailing, 58(1), 111-124.

Author Information

Agustin Godás Otero (submitting)

University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Mar Lorenzo Moledo (presenting)

University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Murillo Ánxela

USC

Teoría de la Educación, Historia de la Educación y Pedagogía Social

Pontevedra

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.