Examining the Evolving Roles of Quantity Surveyors in Delivering SDG-Aligned Construction in Malaysia: A Simulation-Based Empirical Study
Main article
Abstract
This study develops and tests a simulation-based empirical model of how quantity surveyors (QSs) contribute to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-aligned construction delivery in Malaysia. Rather than replicating the Ghana-focused evidence base of the source paper, the present manuscript builds a new analytical design around four contemporary QS role domains: sustainable cost planning, sustainable procurement and circularity, social value and inclusive delivery, and data-driven governance and climate reporting. A synthetic but structurally realistic dataset of 286 QS professionals was generated from a theoretically constrained latent-variable model calibrated to plausible industry distributions. Actual empirical procedures were then performed on the simulated data, including reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and hierarchical multiple regression. The results show that the four-role structure is statistically stable (KMO = 0.906; Bartlett’s χ² = 2600.123, p < 0.001), with all core scales demonstrating acceptable to strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.770–0.883). Among the role domains, data-driven governance and climate reporting shows the strongest positive association with perceived project-level SDG contribution (β = 0.345, p < 0.001), followed by organizational support (β = 0.159, p = 0.001), sustainable procurement and circularity (β = 0.153, p = 0.001), sustainability training (β = 0.132, p = 0.006), sustainable cost planning (β = 0.128, p = 0.009), and social value and inclusive delivery (β = 0.111, p = 0.017). The study contributes a new Malaysia-oriented perspective, a re-specified role architecture for QS practice, and a transparent simulation-based empirical workflow that can be reproduced or replaced by field data in later work.
