COMBINING DELPHI, AHP, AND DEMATEL TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ SATISFACTION ON NATIONAL YOUTH TRAINING CENTRES (IKBNS): AN INTRODUCTORY IDEA

Abstract

Abstract Devising the finest possible strategies to enhance students’ satisfaction towards the national youth training centres (IKBNs – Institut Kemahiran Belia Negara) is not a simple task as it entails the consideration of various attributes that carry different levels of priority. Also, in reality there exist some complex relationships between these attributes. Having clear information regarding the priorities and relationships held by these attributes may facilitate the key players of an institute to properly decide the strategies that could significantly boost the students’ satisfaction. Sadly, there are not too many empirical studies relating to any Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutes that have delivered such complete information to the decision makers. This paper introduces a new hybrid multi-attribute decision making (MADM) procedure as to scientifically develop the right strategies to improve the satisfaction of the students studying in East Malaysia IKBNs, especially by understanding the actual priorities and relationships held by the attributes. The proposed procedure uses DELPHI survey to finalize the list of attributes that could influence the students’ satisfaction, factor analysis to extract the large set of attributes into fewer independent factors, a modified analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to prioritize the extracted independent factors, and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) to uncover the causal-effect relationships between the attributes within each factor.