Research On The Elderly Participation In Government Purchase Seniors Services

With the dramatic aging of Chinese population,the seniors services purchased by the government has been seen playing a significant role in effective services delivery.The multiple stakeholders of government purchase services consist of such as the government,service providers,the elderly and the third-party organization.The relationship and responsibility among those stakeholders is one of the focuses of academic and practical concerns.However,limited studies have examined the impact of the elderly participation on government purchase services.In this study,the research question was“How to promote the elderly participation in government purchase seniors services”.The purposes of this study were: 1)to examine the motivation of the elderly participation in government purchase seniors services;2)to reveal the process of elderly participation in government purchase seniors services;3)to evaluate the influence of elderly participation in government purchase seniors services;and 4)to provide public policy implications that directly toward to improve elderly participation in government purchase seniors services.This was an empirical study of Shanghai.In this study,the theoretically grounded model was guided by the Customer Participation Theory and New Public Management Theory.From the individual perspective,the conceptual model based on “motivationprocess-consequence”,the motivation of elderly participation was examined from perspective of individual and organizational,respectively;the process of participation was defined by the participation in policy-making,the participation in services delivery and the evaluation of participation;the perceived service quality and elderly satisfaction were applied to evaluate the consequence of elderly participation.The data were collected by the questionnaire which was designed by literature review and expert seminar.866 elderly who are accepting services purchased by the government were randomly selected from Putuo District,Xuhui District,Minhang District,Yangpu District and Pudong New Area.The purpose of questionnaire survey wasis to collect the information of elderly participation from the individual perspective.Meanwhile,aim at gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the elderly participation in government purchase services,a semi-structured interview was designed to interview the other stakeholders including the faculty of government,the services provider and staff of the third-party organization.Based on the results of empirical analysis,the participation of the elderly was significantly influenced by “participation motivation,participation process and participation results ”.Specifically,the main findings of this study as follows:First,in terms of the participation motivation,the participation of the elderly was influenced by both individual factors and organizational factors,but the role of organizational factors was stronger.From the individual perspective,participation mainly motivated by the benefit of accepting services and reducing family burden.Some of the elderly have the strong sense of civil rights and responsibility,however,it was difficult to translate their participation motivation into participation behavior due to the influence of political efficacy.From the perspective of,organizational factors,the support by local government or community has limited influence on improving the elderly participation.In order to improve the elderly participation in government purchase seniors services,policy directly toward to eliminate the organizational barriers is strongly needed.Second,in terms of the participation process,most of the participation behaviour took place at the stage of services utilization.However,the lack of participation at the stage of decision-making and policy evaluation.In the stage of decision-making,the scarce of opportunity for the elderly to have some influence on decision-making,which resulted in the unmatched between services needs and services provision.In the stage of services utilization,the old people have limited ability to cooperate in production,and the interaction of participation was dominated by passive acceptance of service,which has made the difficult to monitor and evaluate the services.In the stage of evaluation,it was hard for the elderly to have the chance to cooperate with a third-party organization to evaluate the services.Therefore,it is of great importance to improve the elderly participation in each stage of the government purchase seniors services.Third,in terms of the results of participation,the elderly who received services generally showed high perception and satisfaction of service quality,which similar with previous literature.However,this study further found that the role of "service participation" in the process of participation had a significant role in predicting the perceived service quality and satisfaction of the elderly,while had a weaker influence in "decision-making " and "evaluation".The result quality had little contribution to the overall quality of service.Although there was a positive correlation between the perceived service quality and the elderly satisfaction,it was obviously insufficient in the prediction of "result satisfaction".The public-owned background of service provision and the administrative management may potentially be associated with the high perceived service quality among the elderly.Furthermore,the reasons,on one hand,for the high satisfaction of the elderly may be associated with the vague services expectation of the elderly,as well as the low-price or free services.On the other hand,some factors such as partly meet the needs of the elderly,the concerns of the operation of the government and the service providers also may have impacted on the high satisfaction among the elderly.Therefore,the elderly high satisfaction may not result from the high quality of services.The scarce of participation in such as decision-making stage may have influenced the real satisfaction of the elderly.Fourth,government purchase seniors services characterized by "from up-to-bottom",which may cause the unmatched between the elderly participation and the government purchase stages.In order to promote the elderly participation in seniors services purchase,the government should play the leading role in connecting different stakeholders,as well as taking elderly participation into consideration in each stage of government purchase.Additionally,with the aim of improving the elderly quality of life,the needs of seniors services should not be been taken lightly in government purchase seniors services.The potential contributions as follows: First,this study with an approach of emphasizing the elderly participation in government purchase,which has been ignored in previous studies.Second,based on the Customer Participation Theory and New Public Management Theory,this study put up with a conceptual model of “motivationprocess-consequence” to examine the potential predictors which have influenced the elderly participation in each government purchase stage.Third,this study found that the relatively high satisfaction among the elderly may not directly be resulted from high quality of seniors services.The potential reason for this was that the characteristic “from up-to-bottom" of government purchase has weaken the sense of elderly participation,which has caused the overvalued of the effect of government purchase seniors services evaluation.The primary policy implication of this study was that public policy directly toward to improve the elderly participation may help to evaluate the effect of government purchase seniors services,as well as to enhance the quality of services.