Initially, semi-structured interviews were conducted involving 14 experts from prison and construction sectors for their opinions on smart building technologies that were currently being used in UAE prisons and the potential criteria for their selection (unpublished data). After conducting a thematic analysis of the interviewees’ responses and literature review, 15 smart building technologies and 14 criteria on how to select these technologies were listed in the questionnaire.

The questionnaire contains three sections. The first section included questions on the respondents’ personal and socio-economic information such as age, gender, employment status, education level, type of organization, and the number of years with the organization. The next section was designed to rank the smart building technologies being used in prison facilities in UAE based on the Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5 (where 1 represented not important at all, and 5 represented extremely important) regarding their importance. The last section explored the opinion of respondents on the relative importance of different criteria for the selection of smart building technologies in the UAE prisons based.

Responses to questions in each section were measured on a Likert scale ranging from 1–5 (where 1 represented not important at all, and 5 represented extremely important)