Critical factors affecting construction quality in Nigeria: evidence from industry professionals

Abstract

The overall aim of this study is to improve construction quality in Nigeria through the identification of pertinent factors affecting the process. Relevant factors were identified from the literature and studied by means of questionnaire survey sent to construction industry professionals that include architects, engineers, quantity surveyors and builders. The importance of each factor was computed for all the professionals via the severity and frequency responses of the factors. Data analysis includes ranking comparison among the professionals using severity, frequency and importance indexes. Percentage rank agreement factor (PRAF) was used to measure agreement of the importance ranking among construction professionals and one sample t-test was conducted to determine the significance of each factor. Finally, correlation analysis was used to measure the degree of correlation among all professionals.

The results shows that the five most important factors are ‘poor quality of materials delivered to site’, ‘low level of skill and labour experience’, ‘poor inspection and testing’, ‘poor site installation procedure’, and ‘lack of quality assurance’. The one sample t-test shows that 79% of the factors are important in affecting construction quality in Nigeria. There was strong agreement between the architects and the engineers (.71), the architects and the builders (.73), and the engineers and the builders (.75), while the level of agreement between the architects and the quantity surveyors (.43), the engineers and the quantity surveyors (.36), and the builders and the quantity surveyors (.38) is low. Determining the construction industry professionals' viewpoints on factors affecting construction quality is therefore an essential first step towards establishing methods and processes for real improvement of quality in Nigeria and probably most other African countries that are similar in nature.

Keywords::

• construction quality
• project quality
• stakeholders
• critical success factors
• construction professionals
• developing countries
• Nigeria
• Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.