Confirmatory Factor Analysis of Neighbourhood Features amongst South African Low-Income Housing Occupants

Abstract

There is a fundamental link between theory and measurement advising that confirmation of measures should be the first stage of theory testing. The aim of this paper was to confirm the factorial validity of the neighbourhood features for use in a residential satisfaction study amongst South Africa low-income housing occupants'. The study was conducted amongst the occupants' of subsidized low-income in South Africa. Data used in the study was obtained from a Delphi and field questionnaire study. Primary data were collected by a face-to-face administered questionnaire survey conducted among 751 low-income housing residents' in three metropolitan and one district municipality in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. Data gathered via the questionnaire survey were analyzed using structural equation modelling (SEM) which was used to assess the factor structure of the constructs. SEM analysis revealed that the rho coefficient and the Cronbach's alpha coefficient of internal consistency were over 0.70 criterions for acceptability. Further finding was that neighbourhood features influence on the residents' satisfaction was not statistically significant and hence was weak in the prediction of the residents' satisfaction with their houses. However, due to the idiosyncratic dataset used in the study, it remains to be seen if the evaluated indicator factors of neighbourhood features can replicate to other cross-cultural datasets. If this is the case, the paper makes a significant contribution towards understanding neighbourhood features on subsidized low-income housing projects. This study provided significant insight into how residents' satisfaction with their houses could be improved.