LOCATION PREFERENCE FOR FOREIGN WORKERS' DORMITORIES: FROM FOREIGN WORKERS' PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Over the past few years, the number of foreign workers in Singapore had increased progressively. However, their accommodation infrastructures are not well-developed, resulting in a supply crunch of the foreign workers’ dormitories and poor living conditions. Although more land was tendered out these few years to resolve the supply crunch, location issues of the dormitories persisted with limited research from the perspective of foreign workers. Therefore, this study aims to identify the significance of location in affecting foreign workers’ happiness level and the location preference of this group of foreign workforce through the administering of survey. With the survey results, binary logit regression is conducted to predict the attributes significant to the overall happiness levels of the foreign workers. The empirical results identified four robust attributes that are statistically significant, namely location, room size, work sector and number of years in Singapore. Importantly in the context of this study, location is predicted to have a strong positive significance to the overall happiness level. Following on, factor analysis is carried out with three distinct sets of factors being discovered, which encompasses the primary and secondary location factors and the dormitory factors. Through the combination of descriptive statistics and factor analysis results, it is derived that primary location factors which include proximity to transport and amenities are the key location preference of the foreign workers. With these findings, it will help to mitigate the literature gap and make meaningful contributions to future spatial planning of the foreign workers’ dormitories.