Improving the Quality of Community Public Services-Case Study: General Directorate of Personal Records, Brașov

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The work is well structured and went deep into the issues of public service and citizen satisfaction. The sample for the survey research is adequate, and the interview survey is especially worthy of praise. It would be interesting to compare it with the satisfaction of the citizens of a smaller town or several smaller towns. The Likert scale can be from 1-5, but also what you used is 1-7. There is the question of how much the respondents are interested in making a precise decision, rather than roughly rounding it up. It's not a mistake, but I think it's easier for respondents to decide on a scale of 1 to 5. I'm not suggesting you change that, I'm just talking for future research.

In the introductory part, it is necessary to give some basic geographical definitions of the area under investigation. Where is researched area located, how many inhabitants are there, how far is it from the capital, how is it connected to the capital, what is the economic and educational structure of the population, what dominates the economy, what is the percentage of unemployed? These are the most basic geographical facts that can have an impact on the satisfaction of citizens.

Explain in lines 335 and 336 what there are "higher-order needs" and "primary needs".

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The article addresses the important issue of factors that determine citizens' perceptions of and satisfaction with public services. Understanding them is crucial to efficient governance and improving the quality of public services. These issues are of global interest and subject of wide academic debate.

Introduction, results and discussion fit together. On the other hand, the literature review in Section 2 and the assumptions of the research (especially Subsection 3.2) are not consistent with the results of the research in some places and need to be corrected. I also propose to clarify the title of the article - a large part of the results presented in the article concerns ways to improve the quality of public services at the level of Brașov county.

It is recommended to improve the article in the following sections:

1.       The introduction section is well presented and described. However, the Authors should highlight what new contributions the article makes to the scientific debate, its originality, what gap in knowledge it fills. Undoubtedly, the juxtaposition of two perspectives: the opinions of citizens with those of managers fulfils the condition of originality of the research approach.

2.       The literature review contains issues that are not directly relevant to the results presented in the study. In my opinion, the Authors should consider deleting Subsection 2.3 (especially as it does not relate to public administration). Instead, I suggest expanding the literature review on measuring satisfaction with public services (lines 226-235) and separating out a subsection on this topic. It should form the basis for the method of measuring perceptions of public services used in the quantitative survey.

3.       The assumptions of the research presented in Subsection 3.2 are broader than the results presented in Subsection 4.1. The authors should clearly indicate which variables from the quantitative survey they analysed in this article and on what basis these variables were selected, how they measured these variables and which predictors they included in their analyses (age, education, living environment and income satisfaction), possibly on what basis (e.g. results of previous studies). Much of the description contained in the Methods and instruments subsection concerns the methods used to measure quality of life, but the results of those methods are not presented in Subsection 4.1. Furthermore, the assumptions of the qualitative study (research dimensions) are broader than the results presented in Subsection 4.2. It is important to confine yourself to those dimensions addressed in the article or to clearly indicate which of the dimensions included in the study are analysed in the article.

4.       In Subsection 3.3 'data analysis', the Authors mention analyses of the relationship between quality of life indicators and satisfaction with services, which is not reflected in Subsection 4.1. The description should be limited to the variables presented in the article.

5.       The presentation of the results of the quantitative survey in Subsection 4.1 needs to be supplemented. It would be worth extending the analyses to include response distributions for the question on “Efficiency of solving people's requests” and on “Perception about quality of public services”. The Authors should also consider presenting the distributions of responses to the question on frequency of use of personal and civil registration services, taking into account the age, residential environment, education, etc. of the respondents. Especially as the authors refer to it in the discussion (lines 875-877).

I propose that the passage in Subsection 4.1 (lines 543-554) should be extended to analyse the relationship between the problems indicated by respondents and perceptions of public services (Satisfaction with public services, Efficiency of solving people's requests and Perception about quality of public services).

6.       The presentation of the results of the qualitative study is not clear. I suggest using tabular summaries to increase the readability of the information.

7.       In the Discussion section, the Authors did not compare the results of the qualitative research with the findings of other researchers presenting the perspective of public administration managers. I also suggest confronting these results with the assumptions and the directions of public administration reforms undertaken in Romania or the provisions of governmental strategies for improving public administration. In the discussion, more attention should be focused on the digitalisation of public services, the scientific discussion on this topic and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on this process.

8.       The results, discussion and summary sections contain much repetition.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The article has been corrected. There are several minor errors that require correction:
1. Tables 7 and 9 do not contain descriptive statistics and the authors mention (lines 644-645 and 663-664) that these tables present them.
2. the authors write: "In Table 7 we can cumulate the percentages as follows: 72.5% of the respondents think that the process of solving people's requests were quiet, very and extremely efficient."- Table 7 shows 82.2% (I understand that you are referring to the table located between lines 656-657)
3. check typos e.g. quiet, very and extremely efficient
4. line 729 refers to hypothesis H2 or H4?
5. line 757 refers to hypothesis H3 or H5?
6. in line 756 the authors write about three hypotheses, while they go on to list five hypotheses
7. I suggest resigning from a new section 4.2 Conclusions of the quantitative analysis according to hypotheses - it is enough to summarise the hypotheses testing e.g. in a table entitled Conclusions of the quantitative analysis according to hypotheses.

Author Response

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