A Hybrid Multiattribute Decision Making Model for Evaluating Students’ Satisfaction towards Hostels

Abstract

This paper proposes a new hybrid multiattribute decision making (MADM) model which deals with the interactions that usually exist between hostel attributes in the process of measuring the students’ satisfaction towards a set of hostels and identifying the optimal strategies for enhancing their satisfaction. The model uses systematic random stratified sampling approach for data collection purpose as students dwelling in hostels are “naturally” clustered by block and gender, factor analysis for extracting large set of hostel attributes into fewer independent factors, λ-measure for characterizing the interactions shared by the attributes within each factor, Choquet integral for aggregating the interactive performance scores within each factor, Mikhailov’s fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (MFAHP) for determining the weights of independent factors, and simple weighted average (SWA) operator to measure the overall satisfaction score of each hostel. A real evaluation involving fourteen Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) hostels was carried out in order to demonstrate the model’s feasibility. The same evaluation was performed using an additive aggregation model in order to illustrate the effects of ignoring the interactions shared by attributes in hostel satisfaction analysis.