A measurement model of older adults’ emotional experience in the interior environments of community-based adult daycare centers in China

Abstract Emotional experience has become increasingly important in community-based adult daycare centers (CADCs) for older adults because inadequately designed interior environments can intensify stress, discomfort, and social withdrawal, thereby undermining psychological well-being and everyday participation. However, most existing evaluation tools emphasize functional performance and safety compliance and do not provide an operational framework for capturing, quantifying, and translating emotional experience into design decisions. This study develops a measurement model of older adults’ emotional experience in Chinese CADCs. Guided by the three-level theory of emotional design, the study established a hierarchical framework through a systematic literature review and semi-structured expert interviews, which identified and validated four criteria and seventeen interior design features. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was then used to determine feature-level indicator weights and construct a structured measurement model. The results showed that functional and usability needs received the highest weight at 44.57%, followed by Physical-environmental comfort needs, emotional and reflective needs, and aesthetic needs. The model was further tested through on-site fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) with older users across nine CADCs in China. The resulting site-level composite scores revealed both shared patterns across centers and context-specific differences. This study offers a verifiable and transferable workflow that integrates AHP and FCE to support continuous assessment and targeted environmental optimization under resource constraints.