The Use of Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) in Evaluating Gap between Youth Needs and Policie's Proprieties in Yazd, Iran

The young generations of Iranian population have been experiencing rapid demographic, social and economic changes during the recent years. Growing number of youth population (youth bulge), resulting from the changing demography of Iranian society, produce numerous opportunities and challenges. Given the big size and the current situation of Iranian youth population, meeting the diverse needs of this young generations has been setting important priority in policy-making during recent years. The present paper is aimed to investigate the existing gaps between the numerous needs of young people from one side, and services or policies designed to address the needs of youth by administrative section of government on the other sides in the province of Yazd. Using data from a survey carried out in Yazd, this paper determines the exiting gaps and finally presents some policy recommendations to filling these gaps.

Data were collected through a survey conducted in a sample of 400 young people (200 males and 200 females) aged 15 and 29 years old who were living in the city of Yazd. Respondents selected through a cluster random sampling techniques. Those data were analyzed using the Importance-Performance model to determine the gap between youth needs and the government administrative sections’ performance. General needs of the young people were asked in the survey questionnaire through 35 items and then we categorized the mentioned items into four groups of needs including: A). economic needs, B). social needs, C). educational-cultural needs, and D). entertainment-sport needs. To determine the gap between the youth needs and policies priorities, we apply Importance-Performance model within each of the four specific categories of needs separately as well as for all needs entirely.

Findings suggest that amongst 35 items which were designed for need assessment in the present study, the young people in the city of Yazd give highest priorities respectively to: having an adequate and stable job, the possibility of owning a house, possibility to earn money or income achievement, capability of affording the cost of living, existence of parks and recreational facilities, possibility of owning an suitable car, existence of parks and green spaces allocated exclusively to female, growth and promotion of general psychological and social health, facilitate suitable context for marriage and existence of programs which facilitate involvement of youth to the society. In general, findings imply that among all, the economic category of needs, especially those needs which are related to employment, income and housing are the main concern for youth. Therefore, the young people evaluate a wide gap between these economic needs and executive performance of governmental sectors and they feel necessity of designing some proper policies to address the gaps in this realm. Further analysis of data indicates that there are a significant gender differences between male and female in evaluation of the need in some items. For example, our findings show that there are considerable gender differences for “the possibility of income achievement” and “affording the cost of living”, in which the young men place more emphasize on these needs than the young women (mean=8.92 and 8.86 for male, compared with 8.51 and 8.38 for female, respectively). However, there are not any significant age group differences in evaluation of other economic needs under the study among youth. In the category of social needs, respondents aged 25-29 place more relative importance on the suitable context for marriage in comparison with the other two age group. In the category of entertainment-sport needs, women consider parks and green spaces allocated exclusively to female more important than men (The means values respectively is 6.78 and 7.91). Paper concluded with some policy recommendations to filling up the need- performance gap for every category of young people needs.