| The dissertation explores the organizational effectiveness of a large nutrition assistance program. Organizational effectiveness is defined as the organization's ability to maintain continuous client participation in the program. The study applies the client satisfaction perspective to investigate how organizational characteristics affects client participation. The organizational characteristics, which are the focus of this study, are organizational constituents, legal environment, physical environment, and organizational policies and procedures. Therefore, the dissertation considers how the client's assessment of these organizational characteristics impacts client participation within the large nutrition assistance program.; The results of this study demonstrate that characteristics of the clientele are important predictors of client participation in the WIC Program. In addition, the results establish that organizational characteristics impact client participation. The best fitting model for continuous certification was the final model that included the characteristics of the clientele and the principle component measure for each organizational characteristic. The legal environment model, which included measures of the government laws, rules and regulations the WIC Program is required to comply with, was the best fitting model for complete check usage. Therefore, future studies must consider organizational characteristics as well as characteristics of the clientele in explaining client participation. |
