A harmony index with consideration of experts' credibility in criteria weighting: The perspective of adolescents in the northern region of peninsular Malaysia

Assessing the harmony level of a society is a beneficial effort to deal with challenges of ensuring a united and peaceful country. The social harmony is at stake due to the unpleasant milieu much related to racial issues. Assessing society from the perspective of an adolescent is crucial as today’s adolescents are the future responsible citizens expected to build a harmonious nation. Therefore, this study developed a harmony index that is able to assess the harmonious level from the perspective of multi-ethnic adolescents in the northern region of Peninsular Malaysia. This study employed both qualitative and quantitative methods. Initially, criteria associated with the nation's harmony were identified and qualitatively ranked by selected experts. The Rank Order Centroid (ROC) method was utilized to formulate the weight for each criterion, which was then incorporated with the expert’s degree of credibility. The resulted weights were later integrated with scores on relevant nation's current situations in the Simple Weighted Average (SWA) method to develop the harmony index. Based on a scale of index values, the harmony level can be classified as low, moderate or high. The findings revealed that the level of harmony from the perspective of adolescents is 7.03, suggesting the level of harmony is considerably high and in harmonious situations. Among the criteria, mutual understanding, faith, morality and tolerance are the prominent criteria that promote harmony. The proposed harmony index has successfully incorporated experts’ degree of credibility with weights, formulated through the ROC and integrated in the SWA, which undoubtedly added up and expanded the knowledge in Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) analysis. Subsequently, the assessment through the harmony index could be a guidance to relevant authorities to plan appropriate actions and programs in order to sustain, promote and nurture the harmony among adolescents in Malaysia.