Purpose
In this book chapter, the authors investigate the connection between user satisfaction and the quality of services in Norwegian kindergartens. More specifically, the study focuses on how staffing density in kindergarten affects parents’ satisfaction with the service. The study is based on a paradox: Although politicians often assume a direct link between quality of services and user satisfaction, research shows that this link is more complex. The authors look at data over time and take into account different levels in the kindergarten system (individual level, kindergarten level and municipal level), to find out if this service quality paradox is found in Norwegian kindergartens.
Result
The study concludes that there is no simple link between service quality and user satisfaction in the kindergarten sector. The findings show that institutional factors, such as staffing density, play an important role in parental satisfaction with kindergarten. Parents are more satisfied when there are more employees per child, especially for parents with children under 3 years of age. The authors argue that future research on the welfare state should use multi-level analyses in order to distinguish between effects at the individual and institutional levels, thus providing a more detailed picture of how the welfare state works in practice.
Design
The data set consists of data from the Norwegian Kindergarten Parent Survey (NKPS) and data from the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training’s reporting system for kindergartens (BASIL) for the period 2016–2019. The sample consists of the 4113 kindergartens that submitted reports for all the years involved, and 419,162 parents who have responded to NKPS.
References
Rydland, H. T., Nordø, Å. D., & Christensen, D. A. (2022). Service Satisfaction and Service Quality: A Longitudinal and Multilevel Study of User Satisfaction with Kindergartens in Norway. I Methodology for Multilevel Modeling in Educational Research: Concepts and Applications (s. 383–401). Springer Singapore.