The Association Between Performance Information and the Satisfaction of Different Social Groups: Citizen Evaluation by Racial Groups

ABSTRACTCitizen satisfaction is an important instrument to assess the quality of public services and hold governments accountable to their citizens. Despite significant amount of research, few studies have examined whether citizen satisfaction is generalizable across social groups or whether different social groups interpret it differently. Based upon the ingroup preference theory, this study uses data from Chicago Public Schools to argue that citizen satisfaction varies across different social groups, such that different performance information influences each groups’ level of satisfaction differently. The findings suggest that different types of performance information (overall v. group performance) have different effects on citizens of different racial groups when they evaluate public services. Further, it is important to measure performance for each social group, and as each group’s performance increases, divergence in citizen satisfaction among racial groups may decrease, helping public managers reduce unexpected factors that harm citizens’ perception of their agencies.KEYWORDS: Citizen satisfactionngroup preferencesperformance gapracial integration AcknowledgementI’d like to thank the reviewers and the editor for their valuable feedback. Big appreciation also goes to Nathan Favero and Miyeon Song for giving me comments on the earlier version of the paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Supplementary materialSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01900692.2023.2257001Notes1. The average response rate of high schools is 18.2% where most responses are highly likely to be removed by CPS by their standard of lower than 25%, while the average response rate of elementary schools is 46.6%.2. All four options were scaled as a percentage (0–100%). This study created a weighted index measure by weighting strongly disagree as 0, somewhat disagree as 1, somewhat agree as 2, and strongly agree as 3.3. In the annual report cards and the website, Illinois State Board of Education provides average test scores at the school level as well as disaggregated test scores by different social categories including race.4. In this model, outgroup performance was calculated using the following equation (with the White group serving as the ingroup in this example). The pass rate for each racial group was calculated separately and assembled into one variable (with White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian groups included). The outgroup pass rate for the White group = overall pass rate × 100/(100 – percentage White students) – (White pass rate * percentage White students)/(100 – percentage White students).One should note that the estimation is not perfect, as the percentage of each racial group in a school is the percentage of enrolled students, rather than test takers.5. Parent satisfaction was measured at the race-school level which means that the Chicago Public School system aggregated the parent satisfaction response at the race level across all the schools. The final sample of this study includes 688 racial groups of parents in 178 elementary schools.