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

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.