Article Review #2 Option B

David Riley 10.6.11

Stamatopols, A. & Mackoy, R. (July 1998). Effects of library instruction on university students' satisfactoin with the library: a lognitudinal study.  College & Research Libraries. 69(4), 323-34. 

Introduction

The purpose of this study was to determine how a library instruction program impacts patrons' overall, long-term satisfaction with a large urban university library.  The goal was to define the 'drivers' of patron satisfaction at the library.  My research topic is customer/patron service within an academic library - so determining the 'drivers' of patron satisfaction will be beneficial for my research. 

Problem Statement

Stamatopols and Mackoy addressed the problem of how to know what drives long-term patron satisfaction.  They focus on the relationship between a specific service, library instruction, and user satisfaction with the library.

Literature Review

The researchers spent a great deal of time in the article explaining the historical research in regards to how satisfaction has been evaluated, how library instruction has been evaluated, how objective measures have been used to evaluate library instruction, how subjective measures have been used to evaluate library instruction, how subjective & objective measures have been used to evaluate, and service quality versus satisfaction in library evaluation. Stamatopols and Mackoy studies builds off the historical research listed above to identify actual drivers of long-term patron satisfaction.

Method

The population used was composed of students in several section of an intro English composition course at a large urban university.  The authors collected data three times during the semester: during the week preceding the library instruction (T1), during the week immediately following the library instruction(T2), and during the week the research assignment was due(T3), near the end of the semester. T1 questions focused on students' expectations of library collection, library staff, and computer & print based information, and basic demographic information.  T2 questions were the same as T1 without the demographic questions. T3 questions asked about the actual experience and perceptions of library performance and their overall satisfaction with the library.

The authors focused on three questions with analyzing the data collected:

1) Which perceptions of performance are most/least associated with patron satisfaction?

2) Which perceptions of performance are or are not congruent with T2 expectations?

3) Which T2 expectations appear to have been influenced by the library instruction?

Analysis of the data was based primarily on two established procedures: the paried t-test difference of means test and correlation analysis. 

Caveats

It would have been prudent for the authors to have asked questions about students' previous library experience as some of their results showed that the majority of students' expectations of how helpful the library staff were after working with them was left unchanged.  This may have resulted from previous experience working with the staff.