Research project
The quality of interaction during public service encounters
What are the antecedents and outcomes of the quality of interaction in public service encounters?
- Duration
- 2024 - 2030
- Contact
- Emma Brekelmans
- Funding
- Development grant
- Partners
- BPA Lab
- The Knowledge Centre Psychology and Economic Behaviour
- Section Public Management and Organisation, Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University
- Social, Economic and Organisational Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University
Project description
Public service encounters, where state representatives and citizens interact, are crucial for effective policy implementation and responsive public service delivery. Frontline professionals depend on these interactions to achieve policy goals and responsively deliver public services. Citizen-clients need these encounters to access public services to increase their quality of living. Going beyond these immediate outcomes, we posit that high quality interaction in public service encounters can contribute to overarching perceptions of the state such as trust in public institutions and democratic legitimacy.
This project is a collaboration between the Institutes of Public Administration and Psychology of Leiden University. Over the course of six years (2024-2030), we aspire to advance public administration and social psychology research and contribute to practice by studying the interactions between frontline professionals and citizen-clients and answering the research question: What are the antecedents and outcomes of the quality of interaction in public service encounters?
Public administration research acknowledges the importance of the quality of interaction between frontline professionals and citizen-clients, however, the dynamics of these interactions in the context of public service encounters remain underexplored, with no clear conceptual framework to study the quality of interaction. Besides delivering a conceptualisation of the quality of interaction, this project will also study its antecedents and outcomes.
Study 1
The first article develops a conceptualisation of interaction quality in public service encounters by answering the research question: How can we conceptualise interaction quality in the context of public service encounters? Public service encounters can vary along two dimensions. First, they can have the policy goal of service provision (such as providing access to financial benefits), or regulation (such as issuing a fine for fare dodging). Second, public service encounters can have different functions within the public service delivery process. For example, people-processing encounters follow more routine and standardised procedures to assign a certain status to a citizen-client (such as intakes), whereas people-changing encounters are generally less scripted and aim to bring about behavioural change in a citizen-client (such as the regular meetings between an inmate and their mentor). To come to a conceptualisation of interaction quality across variation in public service encounters, we will observe public service encounters and conduct semi-structured interviews with frontline professionals and citizen-clients.