Who Feels Served? Demographic Equity in Citizen-Perceived Service Quality within Government Customer Happiness Channels in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Government “customer happiness” dashboards typically report a single aggregate score, obscuring whether all segments of the population experience government services equally well. This paper reframes an existing quantitative dataset — 400 users of the General Command of Sharjah Police's customer happiness service channels — through the lens of social equity in public administration rather than through its original antecedent-focused research question. Using the same validated SERVQUAL-based instrument (Spearman-Brown = 0.963; Guttman = 0.959) and the same strategic-intelligence covariates (R² = 0.804 for the combined antecedent model), this paper's central analysis instead asks whether perceived service quality is distributed equally across gender, educational attainment, and age groups. Results show statistically significant disparities on all three dimensions: women reported higher perceived service quality than men (Mann-Whitney U = 13834.500, Z = -3.431, p = 0.001; mean rank 228.76 vs. 187.05); respondents with a bachelor's degree or postgraduate qualification reported higher perceived quality than those without a bachelor's degree (Kruskal-Wallis H = 27.551, df = 2, p < 0.001; mean ranks 221.60, 218.27, and 155.52 respectively); and respondents under 25 reported lower perceived quality than older age groups. These findings suggest that a channel widely regarded as high-performing on average is nonetheless serving some citizen segments less well than others, with direct implications for how governments design and monitor “happiness” channels intended to serve an entire population equitably.