Compare methods

	SERVQUAL for Public Services	Citizen Participation Assessment
Field	Public Administration	Public Administration
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	1969
Originator	A. Parasuraman, Valarie A. Zeithaml & Leonard L. Berry	Sherry R. Arnstein
Type	Multi-item service-quality survey scale	Survey- and rubric-based participation assessment
Seminal source	Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1988). SERVQUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality. Journal of Retailing, 64(1), 12–40.	Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A Ladder of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224.
Aliases	Public Service Quality Gap Model, Government SERVQUAL, Public-Sector Service Quality Assessment, Citizen Service Quality Survey	Public Participation Assessment, Ladder of Participation Analysis, Citizen Engagement Measurement, Participatory Governance Assessment
Related	4	4
Summary	SERVQUAL is a multi-item survey instrument for measuring perceived service quality as the gap between what service users expect and what they perceive they received. Developed by A. Parasuraman, Valarie Zeithaml and Leonard Berry — conceptually in their 1985 gap model and operationally in the 1988 22-item scale — it assesses quality along five dimensions: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. Applied to public services such as healthcare, licensing, social services and local government, SERVQUAL reframes citizens as service users whose expectations and perceptions can be measured, producing diagnostic gap scores that pinpoint where a public service is falling short of what the public expects.	Citizen participation assessment is a method for evaluating how, and how genuinely, members of the public are involved in government decisions that affect them. Its conceptual backbone is Sherry Arnstein's 1969 'ladder of citizen participation,' which arranged forms of involvement on eight rungs ranging from manipulation and therapy (non-participation) through informing, consultation and placation (tokenism) up to partnership, delegated power and citizen control (degrees of citizen power). The assessment combines this ladder with surveys of participants and documentary review to classify a participation process by its level of real power-sharing, judge who is included, and diagnose whether engagement is substantive or merely symbolic.