Domino's delivery service?

What are the variables for environmental sensitivity and service delivery measurement in governmental service?

• ssignment You have a hypothesis that “local governments that are more environmentally sensitive are more efficient in service delivery”. Service delivery is easy to measure but environmental sensitivity is much harder to measure. You are tasked to interview members of the local government on these two aspects (environmental sensitivity and service delivery). How would you go about measuring these aspects using both qualitative and quantitative approaches? Be sure to discuss issues of validity and reliability constraints in this study. Based on the above paragraph, use the following questions to guide you in explaining and supporting the research methodology that you shall adopt in this study. 1)Explain qualitative and quantitative approaches as they apply in this case. 2)Identify five variables you will use for building each of your two constructs; environmentally sensitivity and service delivery. 3)Operationalize the variables in (2) above. 4)Explain how you would measure each of the variables. 5)Identify threats for either internal or external validity (2 in all). 6)Explain methods you would use to deal with these threats in (5) above.

• Answer:

  Without profit and loss, there is no way that a government service can be rational, i.e. in terms of the evaluations of consumers. That is why the questions you have been given are confusing and only lead to arbitrary value judgments. Obviously interviewing members of the local *government* won't solve the problem - they are the ones who will get paid by taxation whether or not the service is any good from the *consumers'* point of view. Service delivery is *not* easy to measure without profit and loss. How are you going to know a) which service should be provided in the first place? b) whether the consumers would prefer that, or other uses the money could have been put to? (Obviously they prefer other things, otherwise force - taxation - would not have been necessary to get the money to pay for the government service) c) whether you're providing too much, too little, or just the right amount? Answer: without profit and loss, you can't know the answers to these questions. There is no validity constraint on any government service, because they just get the money by threatening to throw people in prison, they have no interest in getting it right, and pay no price for getting it wrong. Anyone can be "environmentally sensitive": just don't produce anything! In reality, the problem is *always* to balance environmental sensitivity against the need to produce goods and services to satisfy human wants. Once we factor in the need to satisfy human wants, we can see that governments' pretensions to be any better at environmentally sensitive service delivery are completely false. The reason it's hard to measure this aspect is because there is no way to balance out the environmental quantity conserved e.g. species diversity, as against the countervailing human want that has been sacrificed by the conservation. Thus all governmental services suffer from fundamental validity and reliability constraints because without profit and loss, there is no way to know whether their service is making society better off or worse off, when all the relevant human wants are taken into account. All we know is that people regarded their own use of their own property as more valuable than what government did with it, otherwise taxation would not have been necessary.