WEIGHTS OF OBESITY FACTORS USING ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS

Obesity is one of the most prevalent serious public health problems in today‟s ultra modern lifestyle. It is a condition of excessive fat accumulation to the body in which authentic factors contributed to obesity are very much inconclusive. Although many medical researches unveiled several factors may contribute to development of obesity but the extents of contribution or weight for each factor remain unknown. This paper aims to propose weights for the selected factors contributed to development of obesity using an analytical approach. The Saaty‟s Analytical Heirarchy Process (AHP) model is employed in computing weights for the factors. One hundred and fifty respondents from Kuala Terengganu Town Council of Malaysia were sampled to provide input data using a sixteenitem pair wise comparison questionnaire. Respondents‟ scaled data from 1 to 9 were averaged using arithmetic mean prior to computing using the five-step of AHP. The results show that the factor of sedentary lifestyle was received the highest weight followed by the factor of genetics and medical and psychiatric illness. The weights for the three factors were 0.6042, 0.2649 and 0.1304 respectively. The result implicates the importance of changing life style in minimising to development of obesity.