Importance Counts: The Role of Relative Importance of Service Elements in Client Satisfaction Measures

It is not uncommon for social work service providers, researchers, and evaluators to develop measures to obtain client satisfaction data relevant to their particular service settings. These measures are often constructed through a set of (usually Likert-type) satisfaction rating response items for each of the service elements relevant to their settings. Scores from these multiple items are then either summed or averaged to produce global satisfaction scores. By summing or averaging satisfaction scores across all items, one implicitly assumes that all survey items that represent various service elements carry equal weight. This assumption of equal weight is somewhat counterintuitive because individual clients may perceive certain survey items or service elements to be more important, or carry more weight, than others. Analyzing data from interviews with 112 clients of an elderly case management service agency in a large city in the Midwest region of the United States, this study examined this equal weight assumption in an elderly case management service setting. Results indicated that not all service elements were considered equally important, which called into question the common practice of summing or averaging satisfaction scores of various service elements to represent global client satisfaction.