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Weekly UpdatesWhatever the owner/user demarcation of maintenance responsibility, the user has a primary responsibility to notify defects to the appropriate quarters for remedial action. Seeley (1987) identified six commonly used means of notification by users as follows:
* Telephone call from tenant;
* Return of pre-paid complaint card by tenant;
* Letter from tenant;
* Officer of housing authority finding defects;
* Tenant notifying defect in person at a depot or housing office;
* Tenant notifying complaint to officer of housing authority on site.
Kangwa and Olubodun (2003b) are of the view that owner-occupiers must have an understanding or knowledge of the severity of the defects observed or anticipated in their dwelling structures. This view, no doubt, should also apply to tenants. Unfortunately, however, lack of awareness among homeowners and tenants remains a barrier to prompt notification of defects as most home owners/tenants face difficulties in recognising the symptoms of even the most basic forms of building decay (Kangwa and Olubodun, 2003a). The reporting delay time is the time which elapses between the detection/observance of a defect and report to the maintenance department by the user. This depends mainly on the inconvenience which the defects cause the user and is not a measure of the seriousness of the defect (Lee, 1995). Lack of maintenance awareness prevents tenants from identifying in time the relative value and urgency of a repair (Richardson, 1991) and also manifests in the wrong notion that housing deterioration has no impact on tenants' standard of living (Kangwa and Olubodun, 2003a).
Users also have a role in evaluating the effectiveness of maintenance management systems to provide feedback to maintenance managers. This is usually done in post-occupancy evaluations which measure user satisfaction as an indicator of a building's utility. This system very often excludes building users from the early design decision-making process. McGeorge and Betts (1990) have expressed the view that, in addition to post-occupancy evaluation, a pre-occupancy stakeholder analysis could enhance the utility of a building to the user particularly in the area of maintenance planning. There is no doubt that the end user must inevitably bear some of the consequences of errors in planning. The cost of such errors to the user could be in terms of higher maintenance costs or health hazards.
Two categories of stakeholders, namely owners and users are identified in the normal convention for stakeholder analysis. In the context of housing there could be some overlap between these two categories. Hence McGeorge and Betts (1990) have cautioned that making a distinction between them could be counterproductive. There is no doubt, however, that stakeholders in housing are likely to have conflicting objectives, which a pre-occupancy evaluation can help to balance.
Tenant Satisfaction in Housing
Housing satisfaction refers to the degree of contentment experienced by an individual or family with regard to the current housing situation (McCray and Day, cited in Djebarni and Al-Abed, 2000). It is an index of the level of contentment with current housing conditions, and refers to an entire continuum of satisfaction from "very dissatisfied" to "very satisfied" rather than just a state of being "satisfied" (Morris, cited in Djebarni and Al-Abed, 2000).
Housing is more than shelter and the habitability of a house depends not only on the physical characteristics of the dwelling but also on the social, cultural and behavioural characteristics of the users. This is why Lu (1999) has expressed the view that housing satisfaction is not only an important component of individuals' quality of life but also determines the way they respond to the residential environment. A dwelling that is adequate from the physical or design point of view may not necessarily be adequate or satisfactory from the users' point of view (Onibokun, cited in Oladapo, 2005). On this basis, according to Oladapo (2005), he advocated a systems approach to the concept of user satisfaction involving four interacting subsystems-the tenant subsystem, the dwelling subsystem, the environment subsystem and the management subsystem (Figure 1).
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The model in Figure 1 depicts a system of tenant-dwelling unit-environment-management interaction which produces a housing situation which the tenant component judges as adequate and satisfactory according to his housing needs and expectations. Djebarni and Al-Abed (2000) have combined the adequacy and satisfaction requirements into a housing effectiveness model.
At the heart of the user satisfaction model in Figure 1 is the tenant (the fourth subsystem) who is the recipient of all the feedback from the other subsystems and is therefore the central focus of the model on which satisfaction in housing management should be based. In this model, the housing unit is a part of an environment and must of necessity interact with the environment subsystem which has influence, negative or positive, on the inhabitants' living conditions and their satisfaction with a particular housing unit within an environment. There is also the management subsystem which comprises the whole institutional framework under which public housing is administered.
As stated earlier, housing is more than shelter. Hence, according to Ukoha and Beamish (1997), "simply providing housing units does not measure the success of housing programs in either developed or developing countries. The suitability of the living environment to the needs of the residents is essential for housing programmes to be judged successful". In their research on public housing in Abuja, Nigeria, Ukoha and Beamish found that the management dimension (including maintenance) was the primary source of dissatisfaction among tenants. Measuring housing satisfaction is important because, according to Lu (1999), an understanding of the factors that make a tenant satisfied or dissatisfied can play a critical role in formulating successful housing policies.
From the literature, the indicators of tenant satisfaction with housing maintenance are summarised as:
* Procedure for requesting repairs (Koebel and Etuk, 1998);
* The courtesy of the maintenance staff (Koebel and Etuk, 1998);
* Speed of response and execution by maintenance staff (Koebel and Etuk, 1998; Rosenbaum et al., 1998; National Housing Federation, 2001);
* Level of mess and nuisance caused by maintenance staff (National Housing Federation, 2001);
* The quality of work done by maintenance staff (National Housing Federation, 2001);
* Overall maintenance of the houses (National Housing Federation, 2001).
Examining a maintenance management system using these indicators permits a comprehensive survey of the satisfaction of tenants with the system. However, in the light of the criticisms of tenant satisfaction surveys in housing by several authors, including Satsangi and Kearns (1992) and Koebel and Etuk (1998), a fundamental problem arises as to whether tenant satisfaction surveys can be used to judge maintenance management performance. Indeed, Satsangi and Kearns (1992) argued that conventional tenant satisfaction surveys which set out to measure tenants' satisfaction with service provided often end up measuring factors independent of the provider's performance. They further argued that "the use of the satisfaction score as an indicator of the effectiveness of the service provider, without taking into account the likely impact of other factors upon the rating, is highly misleading". To overcome some of these limitations, they advocated more reliable measures of tenants' satisfaction which should take into account that (a) not all consumers are likely to have perfect information; (b) degrees of satisfaction vary for different individuals in different circumstances; (c) most housing services have no absolute criteria of judgment; (d) judgment of service quality (and degree of satisfaction) are subjective, and dependent upon culture, social identity, etc.
In spite of these criticisms, however, the fact still remains that no better alternative has been found to tenant satisfaction surveys. Even its most ardent critics recognise some of its merits and can only suggest modifications as demonstrated by Satsangi and Kearns (1992). In fact, Ngo (1990) has stated that the degree of user satisfaction is one of the indicators of the level to which a building has been maintained. Several other researchers, including Amole (1989), Walters (1999) and Foster (2000) have supported this view. This makes tenants' satisfaction a good measure of housing maintenance performance.
4. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
A questionnaire survey of three university housing estates was carried out between February and June 2004. The estates, which are among the largest in institutional housing in Nigeria, had a combined total of 1357 units. Of the 1310 units occupied at the time of the survey, every other house in an estate was chosen. This represented a simple random sample size of 5%. The questions were framed to test the tenants' appreciation of the need for maintenance, and elicit responses on their responsibilities and priority preferences, as well as their satisfaction with the maintenance state of their houses. Borrowing from the suggestions of Varady and Carrozza (2000) for a proper measure of tenant satisfaction, the questionnaire covered different components of satisfaction with housing maintenance and elicited both quantitative and qualitative information from the respondents.
The questionnaires were personally administered by trained research assistants to the head of each selected household. Most of the questions used Likert type scales to elicit respondents' perceptions. To minimise the problem of leniency, central tendency and the "halo effect" associated with such scales, the survey instrument adopted a seven-point scale (after Walker, 1994). Thus the responses ranged from strongly disagree = 1 to strongly agree = 7. The significant agreement or otherwise with the notion being tested was determined by adopting the mid-point value of the index (that is 4 = unsure) as the hypothesized mean (Coakes and Steed, 2001). This implies that any result significantly different from this uncommitted or unsure value was assumed to be either positive or negative to the notion being tested (Pullin and Haidar, 2003). To test the reliability of the questionnaires used in this study, the Cronbach's [sigma] values were calculated (using the SPSS package) for the 7--point scale and found to be very high between 0.80 and 0.89.
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