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Evaluation of children’s after-school programs in Taiwan: FAHP approach

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Abstract

The need of after-school programs has become urgent for school-age children in many industrialized countries due to social structure changes. This research develops a hierarchical framework to evaluate after-school programs from two distinct aspects—service quality from parents’ perspectives and marketing strategy from operators’ perspectives—each aspect respectively associated with five mutually independent criteria. Two different questionnaire surveys are conducted respectively to parents and providers in Hsinchu, Taiwan based on pairwise comparison on Saaty’s nine-point scale. Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process is then employed to calculate the relative importance of the criteria under each aspect. The results show that the top three concerns from parents’ perspectives are communication and attentiveness, teacher qualification and counseling, and fee and location, whereas the top three concerns from operators’ perspectives are promotion, price, and product. Our findings reveal a consistency between the concerns of parents and of operators, but the important rankings from the two perspectives are not exactly the same, implying that the parents and the operators do have somewhat different viewpoints in evaluating the after-school programs.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to the four anonymous referees for their valuable comments and constructive suggestions, which help improve the quality of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ph.D. Program of Technology Management, Chung Hua University, 707, Sec.2, WuFu Rd., Hsinchu, 30012, Taiwan

    Amy H. I. Lee, Chih-Neng Yang & Chun-Yu Lin

  2. Department of Technology Management, Chung Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Amy H. I. Lee

  3. Department of Marketing and Logistics Management, Ta Hwa Institute of Technology, 1 Dahua Rd., Qionglin Shiang Hsinchu County, 307, Taiwan

    Chih-Neng Yang

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  1. Amy H. I. Lee
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Correspondence to Chih-Neng Yang.

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Lee, A.H.I., Yang, CN. & Lin, CY. Evaluation of children’s after-school programs in Taiwan: FAHP approach. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 13, 347–357 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-011-9202-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-011-9202-9

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