Intuitionistic Fuzzy TOPSIS as a Method for Assessing Socioeconomic Phenomena on the Basis of Survey Data

In the assessment of most complex socioeconomic phenomena with the use of multicriteria methods, continuous data are used, the source of which are most often public statistics. However, there are complex phenomena such as quality of life and quality of services in the assessment, for which questionnaire surveys and ordinal measurement scales are used. In this case, the use of classic multicriteria methods is very difficult, taking into account the way of presenting this type of data by official statistics, as well as their permissible transformations and arithmetic operations. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was the presentation of a novel framework which can be applied for assessing socioeconomic phenomena on the basis of survey data. It was assumed that the object assessments may contain positive or negative opinions and an element of uncertainty expressed in the form a “no”, “difficult to say”, or “no opinion” answers. For this reason, the intuitionistic fuzzy TOPSIS (IF-TOPSIS) method is proposed. To demonstrate the potential of this solution, the results of measuring the subjective quality of life of the inhabitants of 83 cities in EU countries, EFTA countries, the UK, the Western Balkans, and Turkey are presented. For most cities, a high level of subjective quality of life was observed using the proposed approach. The highest level of quality of life was observed in Zurich, whereas the lowest was observed in Palermo.