An expert-informed weighted measurement model of the architectural environment for women’s sense of safety in Chinese domestic violence shelters

Domestic violence shelters are essential to the response to gender-based violence, yet in China the architectural environments associated with women’s sense of safety remain weakly theorised and rarely operationalised. This study develops and applies an expert-informed weighted measurement model of the architectural environment for women’s sense of safety in Chinese domestic violence shelters. Using an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design, the broader research programme first undertook a scoping review and semi-structured expert interviews to identify and contextually refine safety-relevant environmental indicators. In the present phase, a multidisciplinary expert panel applied the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to derive a consistent hierarchical weight structure, and Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation (FCE) was implemented in ten shelters across three Chinese provinces to generate site profiles and composite scores. The final model comprises four criteria and fourteen parameters spanning defensive integrity, autonomous control, interaction clarity, and restorative comfort. The results show that the model can differentiate shelter performance, identify recurrent environmental deficits, and generate prioritised directions for refurbishment, planning, and facility management under resource constraints across varied organisational and building contexts. As an expert-informed, proxy-based assessment tool, the model is intended to evaluate architectural environment conditions rather than provide a direct measure of survivors’ lived perceptions of safety.