Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | I | International Journal of Market Research

How much can we predict?

Article Excerpt
This paper argues that in considering survey results, researchers need to be more sensitive to the impact of place and demography on responses. By looking at what one might expect for a given type of area, or a given type of respondent, we can reach more intelligent conclusions about our results.

**********

Over the past two decades, MORI has specialised in local studies looking at quality of life and perceptions of local services. In the last five years the availability of important new datasets such as the Index of Multiple Deprivation at ward level and below has allowed us to identify a range of factors that seem to correlate strongly with positive or negative attitudes. What is important here is that many of these factors are not so much about the innate nature of individual respondents--their age, gender and so on--but about the nature of the communities and places in which they live. The implications of this work are that if one is comparing survey results from different types of area and, for example, trying to assess comparative levels of satisfaction with different services, it will be important to be very sensitive to these factors, as they may explain a good deal of 'satisfaction' on their own, irrespective of the good or bad performance of an individual local service provider.

An overarching factor is the very strong relationship between ratings of local areas as a place to live and their relative level of deprivation. In Figure 1 we show recent face-to-face MORI surveys asking people about their quality of life, and comparing it with the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) score for that local authority.

When we add in even smaller areas (below local authority level) and look at individual areas that are being targeted as part of government regeneration initiatives the same clear pattern is evident (Figure 2).

This in turn seems to correlate with perceptions of individual local services, including views of local government, and indeed may be more powerful in influencing views than the actual standards of delivery of many individual services. As our report 'The frontiers of performance in local government' (MORI, 2000) shows, while image, service delivery and communications all have an impact on local perceptions of both the area and local authority, deprivation alone may be more powerful. As Figure 3 highlights, those authorities that serve relatively deprived areas (as measured by the Index of Multiple Deprivation) tend to receive lower ratings from residents than those which cover less deprived areas. This is intuitive: it is widely recognised that public service provision is harder in deprived areas, as residents are more dependent and place more complex demands on service providers.

However, the strength of this relationship is something of a surprise and highlights the weakness of only comparing overall satisfaction levels in league tables. Understanding more about the context in which authorities work can provide more sophisticated and realistic benchmarking and target setting for individual councils and local areas. In passing, the relationship also gives the lie to the idea that there are much lower expectations among...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!