Prioritizing of the Criteria of Physical Education Performance in Medical Sciences Universities by Analytic Hierarchy Process: anApproach to Health Promotion of Students

Aims: Control, monitoring, and evaluation are on the core of any action plan. The aim of this study was to design a model to prioritize the action criteria in the physical education organizations of medical universities through analytic hierarchy process (AHP).
In the descriptive analytic study, all managers, experts, and teachers of the physical education organizations of the Iranian medical universities were studied (n=128 persons).Noticing the nature of AHP and the requirements for selection of the experts, 30 persons were purposefully selected based on their experiences and educational levels. The study was done in two stages. To determine weight and priority of every index at the latter stage of utilization of AHP, the experts were asked to determine the importance of each index compared to another one via paired comparisons. Data was analyzed by SPSS 20 and Expert choice. In addition, confirmatory and discovery factor analyses were used to determine the load factor of the indices.
Findings: The highest, in succession, priorities sfter financial criterion which was the highest priority (M=0.422), were the customer (M=0.3575), internal processes (M=0.121), and development and learning (M=0.0947).
Based on AHP, the highest priorities in the performance of physical education organizations of the Iranian medical universities are financial, the customer, internal processes, and development and learning, in succession.