Factors Contributing to Safety and Health Performance of Malaysian Low-cost Housing : Partial Least Squares Approach

Sustainable development is fast emerging as one of the main priorities of construction industry in Malaysia. Malaysians of all income levels, particularly the low-income group, would have accessibility to adequate, affordable and quality shelter. As a result, safety and health performance in the low-cost housing has become a rising concern. This study attempts to explore the influence of architecture, building services, external environment, operation and maintenance and management approaches on the building safety and health performance among the construction practitioners in Malaysia and their subsequent personal responsibility. The study used the Partial Least Squares (PLS) and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) tool to test the hypotheses generated. Findings from the Partial Least Squares analysis revealed that architecture, building services, external environment, operation and maintenance and management approaches are vital determinants contributing to safety and health performance of low-cost housing in the Malaysian context. In turn, this determinant that is formed will largely determine whether the construction practitioners engage in influencing personal responsibility towards building safety and health performance. Implications, limitations as well as suggestions for future research are accordingly discussed in this study.


INTRODUCTION
The rate of urbanization in Malaysia has increased rapidly from 25% in 1960 to 72% in 2010 (Zainal et al., 2012).An assessment by the Department of Statistics (2010) showed that population density in Kuala Lumpur in 2010 was 7,089 per unit of land area (Department of Statistics, 2010).As a result, demand for affordable housing in the cities has increased, causing an acute shortage of affordable housing.Since the Third Malaysia Plan, the number of completed lowcost housing projects has not achieved its target (Shuid, 2009;Bajunid and Ghazali, 2012).In fact, during the Eighth Malaysia Plan, the total number of low-cost housing completed was 197,649 units compared to 230,000 units needed (Ministry of Housing and Local Government of Malaysia, 2009).Many private developers were engaged to meet the housing need.However, these developers built the low-cost houses purely out of quota requirements as they are unprofitable ventures.Consequently, occupants of lowcost housing are constantly faced with many problems such as sub-standard quality, maintenance, comfort levels, health, safety and security services (Zaid and Graham, 2011;Bajunid and Ghazali, 2012).
A study conducted by Isnin et al. (2012) found that residents of low-cost housing in Shah Alam are generally not satisfied with the condition of their homes and the surrounding environment.The construction methods, materials used to build their homes as well as the lack of cleanliness, aesthetic value, safety, privacy and amenities are among the problems and risks affecting their social health and the environment.Another study conducted by Zainal et al. (2012) also investigated the relationship between housing conditions and the quality of life in low-cost housing in the Klang Valley.They found that housing for the urban poor lacks in physical qualities such as design, size and materials used and in other qualities such as location, landscape and availability of public amenities and services.
Bringing low-cost housing into the context of sustainable development would be highly beneficial for the country's environment, economy and society.Comprehensive tools and concepts must be developed to determine the safety and health indicators for new and existing building with the focus on the prevention of safety and health problems (Akasah and Alias, 2009;Akasah et al., 2011).It is worth investigating further on whether our buildings are sufficiently safe and healthy for their occupants and the general public.Hence this study attempts to examine the determinants of safety and health performance of low-cost housing in Malaysia.It also examines how this safety and health performance may predict the construction practitioner's responsibility toward adopting research model.

Research context and research model:
Architecture: Architecture refers to the layout configuration and disposition of a building that are added to the greater surroundings, which include the finest design details (Bokalders and Block, 2010).To achieve building sustainability, a reduction in environmental, safety and health hazards in buildings require broader changes in architecture, construction and spatial planning practices.A vast amount of research was dedicated to the identification of architectural performance and ways to eliminate architectural defects (Ramly et al., 2006;Isa, 2011;Chohan et al., 2011).Ramly et al. (2006), for example, found that 47% of architectural defects are caused by design defects, 17% from materials, 15% from construction, 18% from misuse of facilities, 15% from poor maintenance and 5% from vandalism.Isa (2011) also found that the majority of the defects identified are related to poor architectural works, followed by poor electrical works and civil and structural defects.These findings suggest that defects could have been prevented if consideration is given to the architectural elements.Chohan et al. (2011), for example, pointed out that architects need to prevent these defects by using more appropriate materials and a better design and layout.Based on the review of the literature above, the authors hypothesize that: H1: Architectural factors, such as means of access and escape, structural and finishes integrity, amenities, space functionality and fire resistance have a positive influence on safety and health performance.
Building services: Similar to architecture, building services are required for a safe, comfortable and environmentally-friendly operation of buildings.Building services refer to the design, installation, operation and monitoring of the mechanical and electrical systems such as electrical supply, lighting, ventilation, plumbing and sanitary, fire services and lifts (Ho et al., 2008).An assessment of building services conditions is important to safeguard the safety, health and well-being of people and to protect the environment (Lai and Yik, 2011).This is important to ensure the maintenance of quality and sustainability of buildings.Lai and Yik (2004) agreed with this view, as they found that building services systems such as fire services, lifts and escalators, electricity, gas and water supplies and ventilating systems tend to be maintained in serviceable condition if they are regularly inspected according to the legal requirements.Therefore, it is hypothesized that: H2: Building services factors, such as electricity system, lighting, ventilation, plumbing, sanitary services, fire services and lift services have a positive influence on safety and health performance.
External environment: Safety and health measures should include the protection against additional hazards introduced by the external environment.Environmental hazards refer to all potential threats facing human society by events that originate in and are transmitted through, the environment (Smith and Petley, 2008).The study by Hamsa et al. (2010), which assessed physical environmental parameters such as noise, air pollution and traffic volume, highlighted several inadequacies of the living environment in the Taman Melati residential area in Kuala Lumpur.In another study, Zainal et al. (2012) measured the quality of the surrounding environment by air quality and peace level.They found that the surrounding environment has a significantly positive correlation with the health status and the overall quality of life.Hence, it is hypothesized that: H3: External environment factors, such as access to emergency services, external hazards, location, air quality, peaceful environment and aesthetics have a positive influence on safety and health performance.

Operation and maintenance:
The operation and maintenance of facilities encompass a broad spectrum of services required to ensure that the built environment will perform its originally intended functions (Sapp, 2009).The study conducted by Mohd-Isa et al. (2011) found that the cost of maintenance work is rapidly increasing in various countries including Hong Kong, Singapore, the United Kingdom and Malaysia.The Malaysian Government has also increased the maintenance budget for schools and health clinics, housing projects, water tank projects, flood mitigation plans and sports facilities, from RM 2.5 billion for 2012 to RM 6 billion for 2013 (Government of Malaysia, 2012;Government of Malaysia, 2013).In order to mitigate the cost increase, Mohd- Isa et al. (2011) proposed a set of criteria for a sustainable building maintenance management.The best practices include: • A clear maintenance policy • Systematic maintenance programmes and priorities • An accurate building condition assessment • An updated information and data integration system Therefore, it is hypothesized that: Management approaches: A wide range of methods and frameworks for measuring the performance of building facilities management were proposed (Olanrewaju et al., 2011).These methods range from a detailed technical assessments of the physical aspects of buildings to surveys of user satisfaction with the quality of facilities in residential buildings.For instance, Lai and Yik (2011) attempted to examine the building users' perceived importance of five aspects of facilities management services, which include security, cleaning, repair and maintenance, landscape and leisure and general management.Nik-Mat et al. (2011) examined the relationship between facilities management and customer satisfaction and found that there was a significantly positive relationship between the performance of maintenance management and the type of maintenance management system applied.Thus, we hypothesize that: H5: Management approaches factors, such as the availability of emergency evacuation plans, documentation and evaluation, security management, occupant safety management and waste and cleaning services have a positive influence on safety and health performance.
The literature also lends support to the formulation of the research framework for examining the relationship architecture, building services, external environment, operation and maintenance and management approaches on the building safety and health performance among the construction practitioners in Malaysia and their subsequent personal responsibility (Fig. 1).

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY Population and sample:
The unit of analysis in this study is all construction practitioners in Malaysia.The construction practitioners involved in low-cost housing projects are mainly architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, building surveyor and developers.Based on the general rule, a sample size of minimum 200 is a good basis to perform a maximum-likelihood based estimation, which is one of the most common Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) estimations (Hair et al., 2010).Non-probability cluster sampling was used in this study.

Data collection:
Seven hundred self-administered questionnaires were used for gathering data from the respondents.A multiple method of data collection was employed, whereby some questionnaires were mailed to the respondents, some were e-mailed and some were personally administered.The process of distribution and collection of questionnaires was carried out over a period of (3) months.A total of 308 were received and used for this analysis which translates to about 44% response rate.

MEASURES AND ASSESSMENT OF GOODNESS OF MEASURES
The research examines the goodness of measure which is assessed by looking at the validity and reliability of the measures can be carried out using the Partial Least Square (PLS) approach.The two main criteria used for testing goodness of measures are validity and reliability.These two assessments helped to ensure that the scale items are statistically consistent and the constructs measure what they intended to measure before any attempts were taken at drawing conclusions regarding the structural model (Field, 2009).

Construct validity:
Establishing validity test assures the researcher that all the measures of the construct fit the theories around which the test is designed.This can be assessed through convergent and discriminant validity.First, the researcher inspects the cross-loadings in order to assess if there are problems with any particular items (Henseler et al., 2009).The researcher uses a cut-off value for loadings at 0.5 and considers this as significant (Hair et al., 2010).From Table 1, we can observe that all the items measuring a particular construct loaded highly on that construct and loaded lower on the other constructs, thus confirming construct validity.
Convergent validity: Establishing convergent validity assures the researcher that all the measures of the construct do measure the same construct or concept and move in the same conceptual direction.Convergent validity was assessed using indicator reliability, internal consistency reliability and Average Variance Extracted (AVE).The loading values of all items are higher than the required value of 0.6, ranging from 0.611 to 0.864.Composite reliability values (Table 2), which depicts the degree to which the construct indicators indicate the latent (Hair et al., 2011), construct ranged from 0.810 to 0.900 which exceeded the recommended value of 0.6 (Fornell and Larcker, 1981;Henseler et al., 2009;Hair et al., 2011).The value of AVE should be greater than 0.50, indicating an adequate degree of convergent validity, as it can be interpreted as at least 50% of the measurement variance is captured by the construct (Fornell and Larcker, 1981;Gotz et al., 2010;Hair et al., 2011).The average variance extracted, were in the range of 0.504 and 0.693.However, results of the ARCHI4 (Building Material), BS4 (Air Conditioning) and OM1 (Building Peripherals) constructs has a factor loading and AVE lower than minimum acceptable threshold value, ranging from 0.144-0.355and 0.432-0.489respectively.Hence, this construct should be considered for modification and this will be further discussed in the section on iteration one analysis.The modification involves the elimination of items with poor factor loadings (ARCHI4, BS4, OM1).This follows Henseler et al. (2009), where reflective indicators with outer loadings of less than 0.4 are eliminated from the measurement model.Reflective indicators may also be eliminated if by doing so substantially increases CR and/or AVE values.Once the modification process is completed, the factor loading, CR and AVE values are assessed again for convergent validity.The results of the iteration are summarized in Table 2.
These results indicate that the suggested modifications have achieved the intended outcome.The factor loadings of each measurement item on its respective construct are above the suggested 0.60 threshold, ranging from 0.606 to 0.864.The CR values for ARCHI, BS and OM constructs have been increased by 2.9% (0.857), 1.1% (0.877) and 4.6% (0.856), respectively.Likewise, there are increases in AVE values for ARCHI (0.502), BS (0.505) and OM (0.601) constructs, which satisfies the required threshold value of 0.5.Hence, the convergent validity is confirmed and no further modification is required.
Discriminant validity: After establishing convergent validity, the researcher assesses the model's discriminant validity based on the Fornell-Larcker criterion.The assessment is to ensure that the diagonal elements were significantly higher than the off-diagonal values in the corresponding rows and columns.The diagonals represent the square root of AVE while the remaining entries represent the squared correlations.The results in Table 3 show that for all constructs, AVE values were higher than the construct's highest squared  correlation with any other latent constructs.The researcher also considers adequate discriminant validity when constructs have AVE loadings of greater than 0.5.In other words, at least 50% of measurement variance is captured by the construct (Hair et al., 2011).

Path coefficients and hypothesis testing:
In PLS, the strength and the significance (or insignificance) of each structural path or hypothesis can be examined.PLS calculates a path coefficient, or a beta value (β), which indicates the strength of the path and signifies the unique contribution that the independent variable makes in explaining the variance of the dependent variable.Fig. 2 presents the results of the path analysis.
The first criterion that was examined is the coefficient of determination (R 2 ) of endogenous latent variables.The results show that for the BSHP construct, R 2 values (0.340) were above the substantial level of 0.26 (Cohen, 1988).In other words, 34.0% of the variance in the BSHP model is explained by architecture, building services, external environment, operation and maintenance and management approaches.Using various significance levels (p<0.10,p<0.05, p<0.01), the results show that all path coefficients from the focal construct to the six hypothesized outcomes were significant.Table 4 presents the path coefficients, beta value (β) and tstatistics.In addition to determining which single factor makes the strongest unique contribution toward predicting or explaining the variance in the endogenous latent variable, the beta values (β) were also determined.The results show that Perceived Responsibility (PR) is best predicted by Building Safety and Health Performance (BSHP).In contrast, the best predictor of BSHP factor is Building Services (BS), followed by Architecture (ARCHI), Operation and Maintenance (OM), Management Approaches (MA) and lastly, External Environment (EX).In other words, BS contributes the most towards explaining the variance in BSHP, exceeding the impact of other factors in the model.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The findings of this study indicate that architecture, building services, external environment, operation and maintenance and management approaches impact on building safety and health performance with building services having the strongest impact in BSHM.It implies that the more and better the building services (β = 0.212) in building, the higher the extent of safety and health performance is observed, which can then lead to improved building performance in the construction industry.This corroborates with findings from Ho et al. (2008), Lai and Yik (2011) and Green et al. (2011).Continuous monitoring of the building services performance according to the legal requirement results in better to safeguard the safety, health and wellbeing of people and to protect the environment.
Architecture too has an influence on the extent of safety and health performance for low-cost housing in Malaysia.This makes sense as construction practitioners must be committed to forging good long term architecture design to achieve success for the construction industry in general and for low-cost housing in particular.As an example, the focus of safety and healthy building architecture need to be incorporated better design detail as well as aesthetic aspects.The findings support the recommendation made earlier by researchers Isa (2011) and Chohan et al. (2011) who suggested that in order to have successful architecture building performance, structural design, architectural building elements, space accessibility and amenities are necessary factors which occupants can live safely, healthy, comfortably and efficiently.
Moreover, external environment also had a significant relationship with safety and health performance of low-cost housing in Malaysia.This signifies that external environment is a critical situation that allows information flow between different parties during different stages of building life cycle (Zainal et al., 2012).In essence, consideration to the external environment factor will assist the organizations to communicate their wants and needs accurately to ensure the safety and health of the occupants which allow things to be done right at the design stage of a building construction.This practice will prevent loss of time, life and wastage of resources thus leading to a better low-cost housing performance.
Operation and maintenance was found to be related to building safety and health performance success.This indicates that mutual dependencies between safety and health performance will increase when the level of operation and maintenance improved.Additionally, operation and maintenance is an important factor for future sustainable building maintenance management works because of the shared responsibility, information, policy, technology, benefits and risks involved in the process (Mohd-Isa et al., 2011;Lai and Yik, 2004).
As predicted, management approaches was significantly positively related to safety and health performance of low-cost housing in Malaysia.Management can create effective management systems through emergency evacuation plan, documentation and evaluation, security management, occupant safety management and waste and cleaning services that address staff at all levels of the firm.A bad management performance can lead to accidents (safety issue) and pollutions (health hazard and environmental issues) besides encouraging an unhealthy work culture and environment (Pati et al., 2009;Olanrewaju et al., 2011;Lai and Yik, 2011;Nik-Mat et al., 2011).
Extent of safety and health performance has a significant impact on their responsibility towards BSHP among the construction practitioners.The result also concurs with Ho et al. (2008) study conducted in Hong Kong that safety and health significantly predicted both design and management factors.However Hashim et al. (2012) study on the factors influencing performance of Malaysian low-cost public housing found that a better safety and health performance could not adequately explain such factors unless the respondents' past experience and their perception of its responsibility towards safety and health performance were also incorporated in the model.Responsibility were found to have the greatest impact in order to accomplish the main purpose of the construction industry which is to build sustainable construction to both, the client and the end users (Hussin and Omran, 2009) consistent with earlier findings from studies by Keall et al. (2010) and Lee et al. (2011).

Fig. 1 :
Fig. 1: Research model H4: Operation and maintenance factors, such as structural and finishes integrity, building services conditions, fire compartment integrity and security maintenance have a positive influence on safety and health performance.

Fig. 2 :
Fig. 2: Results of the path analysis

Table 4 :
Results of path coefficients