Designing a model to estimate the level of university social responsibility based on rough sets

Abstract

The social responsibility of universities is conceived as an ethical and integral administration model that promotes a mutual benefit for both universities and societies. Despite the scholars and decision-makers acknowledging the importance of university social responsibility (USR), a review of previous research indicates that on one hand, not much agreement has been reached on the criteria and dimensions proposed by previous conceptual models, and on the other hand, no particular model and framework has yet been introduced to measure USR. The proposed measurement framework must be capable of dealing with large numbers of criteria and dimensions as well as the incomplete and inaccurate university data in this field. Therefore, this study aims to design a model to measure social responsibility in universities. In this survey, the initial model is extracted from the literature review and then presented to the experts to confirm and extract weights for the indicators. The required data for the indicators of the model were collected through various tools and from different groups of stakeholders. Given the Rough Set Theory's ability in dealing with similar situations, it has been used to determine the level of university social responsibility. Besides, this theory provides the chance to predict a university's USR based on the values of conditional variables by providing decision-making principles. The model is applied for the University of Tehran to illustrate the availability and utility of the proposed model in a real-world case. The results show that using the proposed approach, universities can accurately estimate their social responsibility level while they can save time and expense by measuring only a few indicators.