Elsewhere in Malaysia the study by Nawawi

Elsewhere in Malaysia, the study by Nawawi and Khalil (2008) has established that occupants\' satisfaction highly correlates with the performance of public buildings; meaning that user\' satisfaction has a direct relationship with the overall performance of buildings in meeting the needs and expectations of the users. It is on this bace inhibitors premise that the conceptual framework of this study (Figure 1) is based on the notion that residents\' satisfaction with housing units measured as building performance indicators (BPIs) and determined by the users\' characteristics and the physical, spatial, locational, service and economic attributes of buildings; is a measure of the general performance of residential buildings in meeting occupants needs and expectations as measured by Relative Performance Index (RPIa).
Materials and methods The questionnaire instrument used was designed by the researchers and included questions on the personal profiles of the respondents as well as their satisfaction with 27 items related to the physical, spatial, location and aesthetic and cost attributes of their buildings as well as air quality and services in the buildings (see Appendix 1 for detail of the questionnaire). The questions were used to quantify the attitudes of the residents towards selected 27 building attributes by asking them to rank their satisfaction levels based on a five-point Likert Scale ranging from “1” for very dissatisfied, “2” for dissatisfied, “3” for neutral, “4” for satisfied to “5” for very satisfied. The questionnaire was pretested with some residents of Covenant University Staff quarters and modified to incorporate relevant suggestions made for improved research result. Of the 670 questionnaires distributed, 452 valid questionnaires representing about 67.5% of the distributed questionnaires were retrieved. In addition to the questionnaire instrument, data were also collected using the observation schedule ( see Appendix 2). This was used in collecting data on the objective characteristics of the buildings based on observations made on site during the field work. Using the SPSS software, data derived from the survey were subjected to two types of analyses. The first was descriptive statistics, which generated frequencies and percentages of respondents\' personal profiles, building characteristics, Individual Satisfaction Scores (ISS) and Mean Satisfaction Scores (MSS). The sum of individual respondents\' scores on all the 27 building attributes is Individual Satisfaction Score (ISS).Whereas ISS is an expression of the respondents\' satisfaction with all the building attributes put together, MSS is the average satisfaction score given by all respondents on each of the attributes. MSS was used to assess the degree of satisfaction with each building attribute by all the respondents. In evaluating the performance of the buildings, Relative Performance Index (RPIa) was computed for each building attribute as the sum of the actual satisfaction score on the five point Likert scale given by all the respondents on each building attribute (ASSac) as a proportion of the sum of maximum possible satisfaction score on the five point Likert scale that all the respondents could give on each attribute (ASSmax). The RPIa is taken as a measure of the relative contribution or importance of each building attribute towards enhancing the activities and well-being of the residents. This is expressed mathematically as: In interpreting the result, the maximum value of RPIa is 1.00 and the building attributes with the RPIa value closer to 1.00 are considered as having the most contribution to the performance of the buildings in meeting occupants′ needs and expectations, and vice versa. The second type of analysis carried out was factor analysis, which was used to identify the key dimensions of building components the occupants responded to in their evaluation of satisfaction with residential buildings in the housing estates.