Strategy Survival Guide

Strengths
• A breadth of issues can be covered in a survey.
• Providing the sampling is sound, it should be possible to generalise the findings.
• Lends itself to quantitative data.
• Can assess how far the methods used are replicable (precise), accurate (approximate the true value
of the quantity sought), and valid (represent the variable to be quantified).
• Gap analysis allows both individual aspects of a service encounter to be analysed separately and
perceptions of the service overall to be measured. Thus individual aspects of the service (say, staff
friendliness) can be isolated and singled out for improvement.
Weaknesses
• Data produced can lack the depth, detail and colour of, for instance, the case study approach.
• Difficult to check accuracy of responses or follow-up ideas, although cross-validation can be
conducted (such as objective measures on a sub-sample).
• Causal inferences from survey (explanatory) research are generally less reliable than from
experiments.
• Individuals are very different and may come to a service with very different expectations – for
example more deferential people may arrive with lower expectations than those with more assertive
personalities.
• In judging the overall service encounter different aspects of the service may differ in their importance
for the consumer – for example in one service reliability might be more important than
responsiveness, while in another reliability might be expected and therefore discounted by the
service user. This can be handled through weighting different factors.
References
The Magenta Book on Policy Hub
Approaches to Social Research, Royce Singleton et al.
The Good Research Guide, Martyn Denscombe
Research Design, Catherine Hakim
Statistical Methods in Medical Research, P. Armitage and G. Berry (Oxford: Blackwells; second edition 1987)
Buttle F (1995) SERVQUAL: review, critique, research agenda. European Journal of Marketing 30 (1) pp8-32
The Strategy Unit paper, Satisfaction with Public Services
Strategy Survival Guide – Strategy Skills
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