Land use Planning System and Housing Development Process in Malaysia

124 Next, Section F focuses on gaining the respondents’ perceptions on the level of effectiveness of each housing planning activity. In this section, variables were also measured using the ordinal scale, where the attitudinal responses which were expected to be answered by respondents were arranged by applying the itemized rating scale. The 5-point scale was itemized according to the unbalanced rating, as defined by Sekaran (2003), without neutral point. Choices of answer were arranged from 1 representing ‘not effective’, 2 ‘less effective’, 3 ‘quite effective’, 4 ‘effective’ and 5 ‘very effective’. The application of itemized rating scale enables the researcher to apply the statistical analysis, particularly the analysis of central tendency to summarize the characteristics of data sets, other than analysis of frequency distribution (Putt and Springer, 1989).

The questionnaire continued through section G which focuses on the perception about the fulfillment of objective of meeting housing needs and section H which tries to obtain general opinion on how to strengthen the process of housing planning. To streamline the questionnaire form, a pilot survey was conducted from 15th to 21st November 2006 by approaching twelve practitioners who were directly involved in the housing planning process in the study area. The pilot survey is useful not only to identify the weakness and incompleteness of the contents of questionnaire and the arrangement of questions, but also important to ensure all information related to the research problems and questions are fully covered.

Immediately after finalizing the questionnaire form, the actual survey was conducted by the researcher in almost 1 month period from 23rd November 2006 until 21st December 2006. In ensuring consistency and clarity in questioning the respondents as well as to avoid misinterpretation among the respondents, the survey was done through face-to-face interview with each respondent. By applying this technique, high response rate is ensured where all of the 61 town planners in the study area were successfully interviewed. However, as highlighted by Putt and Springer (1989), Sekaran (2003) and Neuman (2006), this technique also have several disadvantages, such as poor in avoiding interviewer’s bias, incurred expensive administrative costs and also slow in terms of period of collecting data, as compared to the telephone interviews, mail questionnaires or web surveys.