Building Users’ Appraisal of Effective Fire Safety Management for Building Facilities in Malaysian Higher Education Institutions: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Enormous investments had been made in Malaysian education sector of the economy especially in the higher education towards fulfilling a target of creating an attractive environment, conducive to learning and academic excellence. Building facilities account for a significant portion of investments in the sector. Since no building has immunity against fire, it has become imperative to research ways of ensuring the safety of built facilities and users from fire disaster. This research proposed a framework for effective fire safety management for buildings in Malaysian Higher Education Institutions. The report aims to display the results of the pilot study conducted among staff and students from selected universities in Johor Malaysia before carrying out the core survey to collect information from respondents. The pilot study sought to minimise errors in the questionnaire, makes the survey runs smoothly, facilitate the response rate, and provide a useful and valuable inquiry. The results include the descriptive statistics, reliability test, content and construct validity, and the normality test. The summary of the reliability test for each construct of the users’ questionnaire, are Management, 0.910; fire safety equipment/system, 0.907; building components safety design, 0.917. Furthermore, users’ awareness and knowledge of fire safety, 0.948; users’ attitude on fire safety, 0.885 and the effectiveness of fire safety management have a value 0.913 for Cronbach’s Alpha Coefficient. The aggregate Descriptive Statistics results for Users/Occupants Questionnaire show mean values between the ranges of 3.34 to 3.76. The questionnaire had low dispersion and standard deviation values of less than 1. The values of skewness and kurtosis were all within the recommended threshold of -/+2, an indication that all the constructs of the study were normally distributed. The results are a favourable indicator for proceeding with the core survey using the instrument.