The purpose of this paper is to investigate a survey on critical success factor for the maintenance of local public buildings and how reported score values and factor rankings depend on characteristics (contingencies) of the local governments that participated.
The authors use data from a large-scale survey of Norwegian local governments that covered 66 per cent of all local governments and 80 per cent of the population. The authors combine these data with contingent information from public registers on demographics, fiscal, political and geographical characteristics. The authors run regressions to determine whether contingencies affect survey results. They further study how score values vary with a key contingent factor.
The main result of this paper is that the reported importance of critical success factors is contingent on local government population levels. A comparison of importance rankings based on population quartiles shows that ranking orders change, both between quartiles and from the overall ranking, and that certain factors show systematic changes. Further, the authors find that when controlling for sampling error, groups of factors should be considered as equally important. This result holds both for the full sample ranking and for rankings within population quartiles.
The results of this paper have implications for all survey-based investigations of critical success factors where contingent information on respondents are available. Contingencies need to be taken into consideration, both when assessing rankings according to some criteria and when comparing actual score values.
