Extending the importance–performance analysis (IPA) approach to Turkish elderly people’s self-rated home accessibility

Abstract

Designers are still struggling to make good and fair home designs for elderly people. Although there are a lot of studies on accessibility in homes, there are few methodologies to rate the importance of accessible home attributes, or address the relationships between the most important and most satisfactory attributes (in terms of creating a good fit between the elderly and their homes). This study suggests using the importance–performance analysis (IPA) approach to set accessibility priorities and identify the critical performance factors that determine the elderly’s satisfaction with accessible homes. A self-assessment questionnaire instrument was developed based on housing accessibility literature and conducted with 342 Turkish elderly people chosen through stratified sampling among neighborhood clusters in Ankara, Turkey. The descriptive results and factor analysis of the study are significant in that they indicate significant differences among dwelling types. There were differences in importance and performance priority levels of home accessibility factors associated with each dwelling type. Moreover, the study found that safety and ease of use are the key indicators of home accessibility. According to the results, the IPA could be an effective tool to overcome the messy character of evaluating home accessibility for the elderly. By extending the accessibility attributes with the IPA analysis, it is possible to identify specific accessibility attributes, establish highest and lower priorities for intervention and decide which attributes should be maintained and/or ignored. Thus, this study contributes to the literature on aging by being the first study to explore the applicability of the IPA technique while eliciting elderly people’s accessibility requirements for healthy aging.