The cleanness of toilets in parks is an important aspect of the quality of public leisure and health. It is also closely related to the image of the community where the park is located. However, many parks are still regarded as dirty by the public. This study is aimed to find out what are the factors affecting the cleanness of men¡¦s toilets in parks, with Kaohsiung City as the area of study.
Both interviews and ratings were used to look for the factors. The interviews were given to samples from five populations: (1) government officers who are in charge of park toilets, (2) cleaning companies that are commissioned to keep the toilets clean, (3) janitors who are responsible for the cleaning, (4) scholars who have studied the cleaning problems of public toilets, and (5) users of public toilets. Based on results from the interviews, photos were taken for eight factors (e.g., outside appearance, floor) of 38 toilets. A sample of ten users then rated these photos in terms of the cleanness they represented. The ratings given to the photos for each toilet were then summed to give a rating for the overall cleanness of each toilet. The interrater reliability of these ratings, as measured by Cronbach¡¦s alpha, was .98.
Results showed that compared with other six factors, the outside appearance and walls of a toilet were the most important factors for discriminating clean toilets from dirty ones¡Xfrom the users¡¦ perspective. Within all eight factors, conditions ¡§whether the plumbing is hidden¡¨, ¡§size of wall tiles¡¨ and ¡§wetness of floor¡¨ affected the users¡¦ rating most. The users¡¦ ratings were, however, unrelated to the government¡¦s past ratings for the toilets (r = .02, p = .92).
Based on the interview findings and ratings, I proposed that the city government might try to improve the conditions of park toilets by taking several measures. For example, the procedures for recruiting janitors and evaluating their performance should be revised, and prompts (such as signs urging users¡¦ to keep clean) should be changed more often.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0114105-150525 |
| Date | 14 January 2005 |
| Creators | Lin, Chia-hung |
| Contributors | none, none, none |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0114105-150525 |
| Rights | restricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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