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Meet the Authors

Harry P. Hatry is Director of the Public Management Research Program at the Urban Institute and the author of many books and articles on public management. John E. Marcotte is Senior Statistician at the Urban Institute. Thérèse Van Houten is a consultant in human services evaluation. Carol H. Weiss is Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University.

In a recent interview with Richard Deutsch at the Urban Institute, Mr. Hatry said this book is one of the few works that attempts to look at public surveys from the viewpoint of a manager:

Hatry:	It attempts to provide a manager with the basic pluses and minuses of customer surveys and what managers need to know about surveys: how they can be used and their limitations.
Deutsch:	What's the main value of customer surveys?
Hatry:	They can help any federal, state, local, and private not-for-profit human service agency that wants to get feedback from its customers. The focus of this work tends to be on getting evaluation from customers on their perceptions of service quality. Today, probably the major emerging use of surveys is to get information that can tell an agency whether the service has actually helped the customer.
Deutsch:	Is this a typical exercise that agencies go through with customers?
Hatry:	This is a major emerging tool of government. Up until a year or so ago only a few governments had done this. Recently, there has been a major emergence of interest in this at all levels. The federal Government Performance Results Act of 1993, with its focus on outcomes, means many of the agencies and programs have included some form of customer feedback in their new annual performance plans. In addition, the President issued an executive order setting customer service standards which really encourages, if not requires, agencies with programs that serve outside customers to regularly get feedback from them.
Deutsch:	Does the book provide practical direction on how to devise customer surveys?
Hatry:	It tries to, but the book is not designed to present technical details on "how-to-do" surveys. It's not a how-to-do-it book for survey people. But it does try to focus on those issues that a program manager or agency official should know about it. One controversial part is the book's discussion of the tradeoff between cost and precision in surveys, which is very important to managers. In the public sector there's no science that tells you how accurate information should be, so the manager has to decide not only how much money to put into these surveys but also how much confidence to have in the results. It's a difficult subject, but we try to deal with it in the book.
Deutsch:	If you spend more money you can use a larger sample and with a larger sample you get better results?
Hatry:	Yes, that's correct. But the question is: how much precision do you need? The authors of this book tend to come down on the side of at least getting rough data and doing it frequently so that you can help your program people get timely feedback instead of getting a great deal of precision, which is really not needed for most of these service issues, as long as they are not life and death or health and safety issues. Much information the government collects is full of uncertainties anyway, so we just recommend not overdoing precision. Obviously, have as large a sample as you can afford, but it's better to be roughly right than ignorant.