Post occupancy evaluation of workplace child care centers in Malaysia

Abstract

The increasing need of workplace child care centers has brought up the quality issue of its built environment. The importance of conducive built environment for childhood development is widely documented in the literature. It is through active interaction with the physical environment that children learn about themselves and the world in which they live, thereby developing their knowledge and cognition. PERMATA program has established a very comprehensive physical setting guideline which serves as the reference for service provider. But, too often child care center providers only pay attention at the pre-occupancy stage but overlook the importance of Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE). Author filtered building performance parameters identified by Malaysia academicians with POEs done in overseas child care centers and obtained a list of 22 performance parameters under 11 different performance criteria. A questionnaire survey was conducted to seek opinions of workplace child care center users which consist of both child care center staffs and parents on the built environment performance. 2 analyses were conducted on collected data and results show that generally users are satisfied with the built environment. Although air quality, lighting, colors and safety on using centers equipment are among performance parameters with higher criticality indices but they are still fallen in the normal range.