The Effect of Expectations and Expectancy Confirmation/Disconfirmation on Motorists' Satisfaction with State Highways

Over the past several years, scholars have asked how citizen satisfaction with public services might be affected by the expectations citizens have for service quality. Might satisfaction with public services be affected just not only by the perceived quality of those services but also by the quality citizens expect services to have? This line of questioning uses the so-called “expectancy disconfirmation” model drawn from private sector research, which views consumer satisfaction with privately provided goods and services as typically deriving from a comparison of perceived performance to expected performance. This article extends this research by examining the effects of expectations and expectancy confirmation/disconfirmation on motorists’ satisfaction with road conditions, traffic flow, and safety on state highways in Georgia. Expectations were found to have consistently negative, though modest, effects on satisfaction, with satisfaction declining as expectations increase. Those effects obtain in addition to those of perceived performance, grades, and expectancy confirmation/disconfirmation, providing further support for the expectancy disconfirmation model and clarifying some mixed findings from prior research. The conclusions discuss what these findings suggest about possible future research.