A HYBRID MULTIPLE ATTRIBUTE DECISION-MAKING (MADM) PROCEDURE FOR DEVELOPING STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE STUDENTS’ SATISFACTION OF UNIVERSITY HOSTELS

This paper offers a new, hybrid multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) procedure which can be employed to quantitatively develop the optimal strategies for inflating students’ satisfaction of university hostels. The procedure uses: the systematic random stratified sampling approach for data collection purpose as students dwelling in hostels are ‘naturally’ grouped by block and gender, factor analysis to extract a large set of hostel attributes into independent factors, the Sugeno measure for characterizing the type of interaction shared by the hostel attributes within each extracted factor, the Delphi method for obtaining a well-agreed importance ranking on the extracted factors and finally, a non-linear fuzzy prioritization (NLFP) method for determining the weights of the independent hostel factors. The feasibility of the proposed procedure is illustrated by conducting a real evaluation involving Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) hostels. The proposed procedure has the ability to identify the actual factors influencing students’ satisfaction along with the weights of the factors and the type of interaction shared by the attributes within each of these factors and thus enable the management of a university to make better-informed decisions pertaining to the strategies.