Project description
Objective:
The project is about the research of spoken communication between public authorities and citizen:s. Two questions will be investigated: How does the spoken language of administrative employees influence the satisfaction of citizens? And what differences exist between conversations with people from different social groups?
Background:
Public services are important to improve the quality of life and well-being of citizens and to reduce social inequalities. Public employees play a central role in shaping these services. In particular, face-to-face interactions on the phone or in person are important, for example, when answering questions or explaining hard-to-understand cover letters. Nevertheless, there is little scientific evidence on how public authorities communicate with citizen:s in such face-to-face interactions and how accurate citizen-centered communication can be.
Methods:
In a first step, the project developed a taxonomy of spoken administrative language. For this purpose, expert interviews were conducted with government employees. An experimental study then showed that differences in spoken administrative language influence the satisfaction of citizens. Currently, a method is being developed to record and analyze direct communication between government employees and citizens.
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Project partners
Municipality of Konstanz
Municipality of Rottweil
Municipality of Gießen
City Office Durlach
Municipality of Fintel
Jobcenter Administrative District Mayen-Koblenz
Jobcenter Mannheim
Citizens' Service Office Municipality of Aschaffenburg
Tax Office Singen
Social And Youth Welfare Office Karlsruhe
Literatur
Groundwork
Eckhard, S., & Friedrich, L. (2022). Linguistic features of public service encounters: How spoken administrative language affects citizen satisfaction. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. https://academic.oup.com/jpart/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jopart/muac052/6891178
Eckhard, S., Friedrich, L., Hautli-Janisz, A., Mueden, V., & Espinoza, I. (2022). A taxonomy of administrative language in public service encounters. International Public Management Journal, 1-16. Online Volltext: dx.doi.org/ (Open Access)
Eckhard, S. & Friedrich, L. (2022). Kommunikation ist alles - Wie gesprochene Verwaltungssprache die Bürgerzufriedenheit erhöhen kann. Behördenspiegel, 08/2022. https://issuu.com/behoerden_spiegel/docs/2022_august
Siskou, W., Friedrich, L., Eckhard, S., Espinoza, I., & Hautli-Janisz, A. (2022). Measuring Plain Language in Public Service Encounters. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Political Text Analysis (CPSS-2022), 27-35. https://old.gscl.org/en/arbeitskreise/cpss/cpss-2022/workshop-proceedings-2022
Eckhard, S., Lenz, A., Seibel, W., Roth, F., & Fatke, M. (2020). Latent Hybridity in Administrative Crisis Management: The German Refugee Crisis of 2015/16. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, online first. https://academic.oup.com/jpart/article/31/2/416/5922017
Eckhard, S. (2020). Bridging the citizen gap: Bureaucratic representation and knowledge linkage in (international) public administration. Governance, online first. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gove.12494
Hautli-Janisz, A., & El-Assady, M. (2017). Rhetorical strategies in German argumentative dialogs. Argument & Computation, 8(2), 153-174 https://content.iospress.com/articles/argument-and-computation/aac022
Hautli-Janisz, A., & Butt, M. (2016). On the role of discourse particles for mining arguments in German dialogs. In Proceedings of the COMMA 2016 workshop 'Foundations of the Language of Argumentation', (pp. 10-17).