Satisfaction of rural population with public services in the regions: analysis of educational indicators

Abstract

The key idea of the well-being concept reveals the main guidelines for societal monitoring as it tries to answer the question about how well the needs of people in a society are met across various domains - the physical, economic, social, environmental, emotional, and spiritual – as well as individuals’ evaluations of their own lives and the way that their society operates (Gilbert, Colley, Roberts, 2016). The efforts to measure community satisfaction have never lost their relevance as they are directed towards the development of systematic approach to societal monitoring. The presented research also aims to complement to this approach. Its theoretical concepts are: "rural-city differences"; "Objective and subjective quality of life", "Public services and their quality", "Measurement of satisfaction with public services"; "Education indicators". Research methodology is centered around a standardized questionnaire for population covering 193 primary indicators, which measure satisfaction with various public services: health, social security, culture, public transport, utilities, environment, recreation and sport, public communication, education, etc. The methodology projects the following quantitative aspects: the percentage of service benchmarking and the percentage of ranked service (PR) in the rate of 193 positions. The advantage of the methodology is that it transforms the indicators, which are not comparable in terms of conceptual and official statistics, into relatively homogeneous indicators of opinion. The latter can already be compared and ranked. The methodology is very functional when it comes to identifying: (a) those public services that are subjectively perceived as poor, good or medium; b) it is necessary to look at the satisfaction of the services of a particular sector in different district areas, towns and villages.[...]