Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Master of Arts

Program

Geography

Supervisor

Dr. Jacek Malczewski

Abstract

Quality of housing is crucial to an individual's quality of life as it is known to affect human health and well-being. Several studies have employed different methods to assess housing quality. These methods, however, failed to account for the interdependence among the factors (criteria) used for evaluating the quality of housing. This thesis proposes an Analytic Network Process (ANP)-based framework, integrated into Geographic Information Systems (GIS), to assess housing quality. ANP is a multicriteria analysis method. It provides a tool for identifying the relative importance of all the elements (criteria) influencing a goal of decision/evaluation problem (e.g., the problem of evaluating housing quality). The method allows for incorporating dependence relationships into the multicriteria evaluation procedure. A case study of housing quality evaluation at the district level in Ghana using the framework is presented. A set of quality based indicators related to the physical (structural material, dwelling types, housing services), socio-economic (tenure and household density (overcrowding) and environmental (modes of solid waste and liquid waste disposal) aspects of dwellings was used for the evaluation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The GIS-based ANP approach allows for examining spatial distribution of housing quality. It also identifies the most important factors (indicators) contributing to the variability of housing quality in Ghana.

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