Study on Satisfaction with Basic Public Services in Harbin City

Kexin Li

Harbin University of Commerce, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China

Keywords: Public Satisfaction, Basic Public Services, Local Government.

Abstract: The analysis of residents' satisfaction is one of the important indicators of the government's basic public

service supply. In this paper, a questionnaire is selected to collect the satisfaction of residents in Harbin city

about 22 basic public services in 9 aspects, and the factors affecting the satisfaction are analyzed empirically

by factor analysis and multiple linear regression model, based on which countermeasures to improve the

satisfaction of basic public services are proposed, so that the satisfaction of basic public services in Harbin

city can be further improved.

1 INTRODUCTION

As the level of urbanization increases year by year,

China is faced with the problem of insufficient

demand for basic public services and insufficient

supply of basic public services. Basic public services

are the basic guarantee for the well-being of the

masses, with the government as the main supply

body, driving market resource allocation and guiding

public welfare organizations to supplement the

supply. Basic public services are directly related to

the protection and improvement of people's

livelihood, social equity and justice, the overall

development of people and the overall progress of

society.（Zheng 2017） In the 14th Five-Year Plan

Work Report, it is clearly proposed to improve the

national public service system, and it is emphasized

that "we will speed up to make up for the

shortcomings of basic public services, focus on

strengthening the weaknesses of non-basic public

services, and strive to improve the quality and level of

public services". The Report on the Work of the

Twentieth Five-Year Plan points out that we should

focus on solving the urgent problems of the people,

improve the basic public service system, raise the

level of public services, enhance the balance and

accessibility, and solidly promote common

prosperity. This paper analyzes the basic public

services into 9 primary indicators and 22 secondary

indicators based on the National Basic Public Service

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5015-7458

Standards (2021), and empirically analyzes the

factors affecting satisfaction through factor analysis

and multiple linear regression models to find the

factors affecting the public satisfaction with basic

public services in Harbin, and provides a reference

basis for the government to formulate relevant

measures.

2 RESEARCH DESIGN

In order to understand the residents' satisfaction with

the provision of basic public services in Harbin, the

population of the study was therefore chosen to be

Harbin residents, including permanent residents,

temporary residents and suburban permanent

residents in the 18 administrative districts of Harbin.

The survey was conducted by questionnaire method,

and due to the epidemic, all questionnaires were

collected online. 300 questionnaires were collected,

of which 222 were valid, with an effective rate of

74%. The questionnaire design was divided into two

parts, the first part consisted of 4 questions, mainly to

understand the basic situation of the respondents, and

some questions were set to filter invalid

questionnaires, and also to analyze the group

composition of the respondents. The second part, with

22 questions, was designed from 22 aspects in 9

dimensions, mainly to understand the comprehensive

evaluation of the residents' satisfaction with the basic

218

Li, K.

Study on Satisfaction with Basic Public Services in Harbin City.

DOI: 10.5220/0012072400003624

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Public Management and Big Data Analysis (PMBDA 2022), pages 218-224

ISBN: 978-989-758-658-3

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

public service provision in Harbin, and factor analysis

was used to assess the residents' satisfaction with

basic public services.

Analyzed the factors influencing the satisfaction

of Spanish citizens with public services through factor

analysis and found that the reliability of public service

supply and the convenience of access by users had a

significant impact on the satisfaction of residents with

public services. (Hu2018) Based on this, in order to

understand the factors that affect the satisfaction of

Harbin residents with basic public services, this paper

uses multiple linear regression models for regression

analysis. Factor analysis method refers to extracting

common factors from the set of research variables,

transforming a large number of measured variables

into a number of comprehensive indicators, and

achieving compression into a few variables that are

easy to statistically analyze with minimum

information loss. Multiple linear regression models

refer to models containing multiple mutually

exclusive variables with explanatory power. (Wei

2021) In this paper, in order to reflect the dynamic

influence process of each variable on the dependent

variable public service satisfaction, four regression

analysis models are made by nesting, and then

analyze the degree of influence of each variable on the

dependent variable public service satisfaction.

3 ANALYSIS OF STUDY

RESULTS

3.1 Analysis of Sample Characteristics

The numerical characteristics of the demographic

variables can be seen according to the following

analysis results, which reflect the distribution of the

respondents of this survey. (Cai 2021) Based on the

results of the frequency analysis of each variable, it

can be seen that the distribution basically meets the

requirements of the sample survey. Among the gender

survey results, the proportion of males is 45% and the

proportion of females is 55%. It basically matches

with the actual gender ratio in Harbin, which indicates

that the survey sample is of high quality in terms of

gender ratio. In terms of the age distribution of the

sample, the bulk of the sample covers the youth group

aged 21-40 and the middle-aged group aged 41-60.

Subjects in these two prime age groups think clearly

and have a certain perception of satisfaction with

basic public services. In terms of the education level

of the sample, 28% of the total sample had completed

only basic education. The sample size of the group

with higher education was 127, accounting for 72%

of the total sample size. This is basically consistent

with the average education level announced by

Harbin City, reflecting the randomness and coverage

ability of the questionnaire distribution. The

occupational distribution of the sample shows that

employees account for 41% of the total sample, and

this group has the most exposure to basic public

services, while other occupations have only partial

access to basic public services, so the questionnaire in

this paper is more convincing. Finally, the distribution

of the sample by place of residence shows that more

than 60% of the sample are permanent residents of the

city, so this questionnaire is more accurate in

reflecting the satisfaction of Harbin citizens with

basic public services.

Table 1: Frequency analysis of demographic variables.

Variables Options Options

Gender

Male 45%

Female 55%

Age

Under 20 years old 10%

21-40 years old 68%

41-60years old 17%

61 years old and above 5%

Place of

residence

Resident in the cit

61%

Suburban permanent

residence

22%

Temporary residence in the

cit

17%

Career

Students 28%

Staff 41%

Retirement 3%

Unemploye

Individual / Freelance 21%

Academic

qualificati

ons

High school/junior high

school and below

28%

College 15%

Undergraduate 43%

Master and above 14%

3.2 Reliability and Validity Analysis

3.2.1 Reliability Analysis

Reliability is a method to test the reliability of the

recovered sample of the questionnaire, that is,

repeatedly testing the same object for several times, if

the results obtained each time are consistent, then the

reliability is high, and vice versa, then the reliability

is low, so this method is commonly used in academia

to test the reliability of the questionnaire before

starting the next step of questionnaire analysis. There

Study on Satisfaction with Basic Public Services in Harbin City

219

are many methods of reliability testing, and in this

paper, we choose the Cronbach's alpha coefficient

method to test the reliability of this questionnaire

sample, and the 9 dimensions of the second part of the

questionnaire are analyzed separately by SPSS for

reliability, and the conclusions are shown in Table 2.

The reliability of this questionnaire is above 0.8,

which indicates that the reliability of this survey is

high and can be analyzed in the next step.

Table 2: Results of confidence analysis.

Variable

Cronbach's alpha

coefficient

Satisfaction with early

childhood education

0.838

Satisfaction with learning

and education

0.861

Satisfaction with work 0.837

Satisfaction with medical

care for the sic

0.883

Satisfaction with old age

care

0.847

Satisfaction with housing 0.828

Satisfaction with support for

the wea

0.840

Satisfaction with military

service

0.824

Satisfaction with cultural

and s

orts services

0.845

Overall Reliability

Coefficient

0.887

3.2.2 Validity Analysis

Validity is also known as validity, which is commonly

known as whether the results of the survey achieve the

results that the questionnaire designer wants to

achieve, and there are many methods of validity

analysis. As shown in Table 3, the KMO of this

survey questionnaire is 0.866 over 0.6, and the

Bartlett significance level is 0 less than 0.05, which

means that the validity is very good.

Table 3: KMO and Bartlett's test.

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of

Sampling Adequacy

0.866

Bartlett's test of

sphericity

Approximate

chi-square

7601.014

df 231

Significance 0.000

3.3 Satisfaction Analysis

In order to measure the satisfaction of residents with

basic public services, this paper sets five options for

each type of basic public services: "very satisfied",

"relatively satisfied", "generally satisfied", "relatively

dissatisfied" and "very dissatisfied". For each type of

basic public service, five options are set: "very

satisfied", "relatively satisfied", "generally satisfied",

"relatively dissatisfied" and "very dissatisfied", which

are assigned 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 points respectively. If the

proportion of respondents who chose "very satisfied"

and "relatively satisfied" is taken as the index of

satisfaction with each basic public service, we will

have a column of satisfaction with basic public

services. Then we get a histogram of residents'

satisfaction with basic public services. The highest

satisfaction rate is 77.31% for the military service,

followed by 74.22% for the elderly service, with a

small difference between the two. Among the nine

types of public services, the satisfaction rate of

housing services is significantly smaller, at 44.93%.

Figure 1: Basic public service satisfaction index.

This paper uses factor analysis to calculate the

total score of residents' satisfaction with the above

nine types of basic public services. It is a statistical

analysis method that uses a few factors to describe the

association between many indicators or factors, and a

few less factors to reflect most of the information of

the original data. The mathematical expression of the

factor analysis model is:

Xi = μ + ai



+ai



+⋯+ai



+ε



（i=1，2…，p）

where Xi is the observed random variable, Fi is the i-

th public factor, which is an unobservable variable, aij

(j=1, 2, ..., m) is the factor loading, and εi is the special

factor, which is the part that cannot be included by the

first m public factors.

As shown the table4, for the nine basic public

service satisfaction variables, one common factor

with eigenvalues greater than 1 was extracted by

77,31

74,22

73,59

68,33

64,23

63,22

55,21

54,65

44,93

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applying the principal component method. Moreover,

this one common factor can explain 69.37% of the

total variance of the 11 variables. Overall, it has a high

degree of concentration and the amount of

information loss is within an acceptable range.

Table 4: Public factor analysis.

Common

factor

Eigenvalue Variance Proportion

Cumulative

variance

F1 6.86159 6.92047 0.6830 0.6937

F2 0.64112 0.05889 0.0583 0.7222

F3 0.58222 0.08087 0.0529 0.7661

F4 0.50135 0.05157 0.0456 0.7807

F5 0.44978 0.0497 0.0409 0.8216

F6 0.40008 0.01097 0.0363 0.8421

F7 0.38911 0.05855 0.0355 0.9233

F8 0.29181 0.03875 0.0365 0.9432

F9 0.27781 0.014 0.0153 1.0000

As shown in the figure below the table, a common

factor extracted using the principal component

method has high factor loading values on all nine

basic public service satisfaction variables. Moreover,

each of the basic public service satisfaction variables

has a more balanced commonality on the common

factor, and there is no significantly low commonality.

Therefore, we saved the scores of the first common

factor and, for comparison, multiplied its value by 100

as the total score of residents' satisfaction with the

nine public services in Harbin, with higher scores

indicating higher satisfaction as the dependent

variable.

Table5: Analysis of dependent variables.

Variables Factor Load Commonalit

Childhood

Education

0.8028 0.3555

Learning and

teaching

0.7962 0.366

Medical care

for the sic

0.7466 0.4425

Cure for

illness

0.7438 0.4468

Ageing in

lace

0.8085 0.3463

Work for a

livin

0.7304 0.4665

Weaknesses

are su

orte

0.7809 0.3902

Military

service

0.8331 0.3059

Cultural and

Sports Service

0.7914 0.3737

In order to investigate the factors affecting the

satisfaction of basic public services of Harbin

residents, this paper uses a general multiple linear

regression model with the score of satisfaction with

basic public services as the dependent variable, and

the basic variables of gender, age, education,

occupation, and place of residence are statistically

controlled, and the analysis focuses on the

relationship between the sense of access, sense of

fairness, and public policy awareness of Harbin

residents on the dependent variable of satisfaction

with public services. The mathematical expression of

the model is as follows the mathematical expressions

of the model are as follows.

y=b







+⋯+b



In the above equation, y is the dependent variable,

which in this paper is the public service satisfaction

score, b0 is a constant term representing the base level

at which all independent variables are 0 is the

dependent variable, b1, b2, b3, bn are partial

regression coefficients representing the average

change in the dependent variable when the particular

independent variable changes by one unit, given that

the other independent variables take the same value. e

is the sampling error term.

Based on the above ideas, the results of the

multiple linear regression analysis made by using

Stata 12.0 statistical software are shown in Table 6. In

order to reflect the dynamic influence process of the

respective variables on the dependent variable public

service satisfaction, the author made four regression

analysis models by nesting.

Table 6: Multiple linear regression analysis.

Independent variable

Benchmark

Model

Access

Model

Sense of

fairness model

Cognitive

degree

model

Gender (M=0) 1.995 2.922 4.045 6.239*

(-4.904) (-3.806) (-3.653) (-3.614)

Age 0.982*** 0.485*** 0.311** 0.226*

(-0.184) (-0.144) (-0.138) (-0.137)

Study on Satisfaction with Basic Public Services in Harbin City

221

College(below high

school/junior high

school = 0)

-2.819** -1.144 -4.377 -6.59

(-6.018) (-4.671) (-4.489)

(-4.436)

Bachelor's degree or

above

5.849** -0.915 -4.708 -6.76

(-6.992) (-5.43) (-5.219) (-5.153)

Place of residence

(

suburb = 0

)

6.932** -4.368 -0.146 -0.0511

(-4.658) (-3.63) (-3.499) (-3.45)

Staff(student=0) -11.07* -3.457 -3.195 -0.924

(-6.014) (-4.673) (-4.483) (-4.431)

Unemployed/retired -19.08*** -4.275 -4.491 0.0572

(-5.73) (-4.468) (-4.287) (-4.273)

Sense of Access 10.70*** 8.723*** 8.180***

(-0.312) (-0.339) (-0.342)

Sense of fairness 7.976*** 7.098***

(-0.641) (-0.643)

Policy Awareness 2.656***

(-0.367)

Constant term -53.86*** -347.2*** -385.0*** -377.2***

(-12.36) (-12.85) (-12.69) (-12.56)

Case items 1,849 1,849 1,849 1,849

R2 0.070 0.440 0.485 0.500

4 CONCLUSION

The results show that the regression has much higher

explanatory power, with the R2 reflecting the

regression's extraordinary explanatory power

increasing from 0.07 to 0.44. Moreover, the variable

of access to basic public services has a significant

positive effect on satisfaction with basic public

services, specifically, for the same value of other

independent variables, the score of satisfaction with

basic public services will increase by 10.7 points on

average for every 1 point increase in the score of

access to basic public services. Specifically, with the

same values of other independent variables, for every

1-point increase in the basic public service access

score, the basic public service satisfaction score will

increase by 10.7 points on average. This means that

the higher the farmers' sense of access to public

services, the higher their satisfaction with public

services. By adding a new independent variable, sense

of fairness, to the access model, a multiple linear

regression model of sense of fairness is obtained.

model. (Cheng 2022) The results show that the

explanatory power of the equation has improved

significantly, with the R2 of the model increasing

from 0.44 to 0.485. Moreover, there is a significant

positive relationship between perception of fairness

and satisfaction with public services, specifically, for

residents of Harbin City, every 1-point increase in

perception of fairness score will increase their

satisfaction with basic public services by 7.976 points

on average. This indicates that the higher the sense of

equity in basic public services, the higher the

satisfaction with public services. (Ruan 2020) A

multiple linear regression model of policy awareness

was obtained by adding a new independent variable,

public service policy awareness, to the model of

perceived fairness. The results showed that the

explanatory power of the equation improved

significantly, with the R2 of the model increasing

from 0.485 to 0.5. Moreover, policy awareness had a

significant positive effect on public service

satisfaction, specifically, for Harbin residents, each

point increase in the awareness of basic public service

policies would increase their public service

satisfaction scores by 2.656 points on average. This

means that the higher the residents' awareness of

public service policies, the higher their satisfaction

with public services.

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5 SUGGESTIONS

5.1 Establishing a Diversified Supply

Mechanism

Although the government department is the largest

supply body of public services, responsible for

coordinating the construction of basic public services

around the world, but basic public services can not be

provided by the government department only, in some

cases the government department also exists

dysfunctional phenomenon, inevitably brings the

problem of inefficient supply, resulting in the

phenomenon of waste of public resources. Therefore,

the government of Harbin should prepare for the

future, create a social environment conducive to the

development and growth of various social

organizations, encourage and support social capital

forces to join the supply of basic public services, and

at the appropriate time to introduce organizational

competition mechanism, in order to promote social

capital to join the supply of public services more

vitality, and thus enhance the efficiency of the supply

of basic public services.(Zhang 2019) At the same

time, social capital should be given moderate

preferences at the policy level, for example, in terms

of capital loans, preferential treatment can be given to

reputable enterprises by lowering loan interest rates

and lowering loan thresholds, so as to better attract

high-quality social capital to various aspects of basic

public goods and services.(Siddiqui 2021)

5.2 Smooth Channels for Expressing

Residents' Interests and Demands

Smooth channels for expressing public opinion can

also help residents to play a supervisory role in the

distribution of basic public service resources, prevent

integrity risks in the distribution process by those who

distribute benefits, and help government departments

to divide the cake of basic public service resources

well and form a reasonable distribution pattern that is

fairly enjoyed by all. (Ren 2022) In the past, people

used to express their opinions by putting their written

letters into opinion boxes, but with the progress of the

times, people have more convenient and efficient

channels to express their opinions, such as through

WeChat and e-mail, and these anonymous ways of

expression can help farmers to express their opinions

freely, which helps to eliminate the differences

between residents and government departments, ease

the conflicts between the government and the people,

and form a harmonious social atmosphere.

5.3 Strengthening Farmers' Policy

Awareness

Residents' awareness of basic public service policies

determines the satisfaction of public services.

Increasing the publicity of residents' basic public

service policies is conducive to enhancing residents'

awareness of the policies.

(Wei 2014) Residents must

know the policy in order to understand it, and then

accept and comply with it. Therefore, government

departments should strengthen the publicity of public

service policies and optimize the way of public

service policy publicity, so that public service policies

can really penetrate into the hearts of the people.

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