The citizen satisfaction toward services offered by municipality: a comparison between two provinces by NPC test

Today the government is improving the ability of listening to the needs and assessment of the quality perceived by citizens and businesses. The framework allows managers to individuate which customer satisfaction elements exert a greatest influence and how many economic resources should be used to improve customer satisfaction The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the satisfaction of citizens about the quality of internal and external services provided by municipalities. For this reason we focused our attention on six Municipalities, from which three are located in Messina Province and three in Reggio Calabria Province. The survey was performed in the first half of 2013, according to the technique of proportionate stratified sampling, taking into account the population density of the different examined areas. The whole sample is composed by 887 interviewed (53.3% belonging to Messina province and 46.7% to Reggio Calabria province). The questionnaire was structured into three sections: an introductory registry section to obtain basic information on gender and age, educational status and professional condition of the interviewees; a section on interest indicators related to external services and a section related to the conditions of municipal buildings and to internal services. Each user gave its judgment, for each item, on an ordinal growing scale on five levels. From methodological point of view, the non-normality in the distribution of the considered phenomena does not guarantee valid asymptotic results; consequently the non-parametric approach has been used. In particular we used the Non Parametric Combination (NPC) test, based on permutation test, chosen for the several optimal properties of which it is characterized; in particular, it allows stratified analyses.