Mobility,Perceptions of Quality of Life and Neighbourhood Stability in Saskatoon

Why people move, their well-being or self-assessed quality of life and the impact that this has on the stability of neighbourhoods are linked in many ways. One of the expected outcomes related to the attachment to and meaning of place is the level of intra-urban mobility by individuals and families. Those who have negative or neutral feelings towards the place they reside are expected to experience a greater level of intra-urban mobility. The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between residential mobility and perceived well-being or self-assessed quality of life in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan across three clusters of neighbourhoods representing different socio-economic status (SES) (low, middle and high). The paper begins with a review of the literature on residential mobility and highlights concepts such as the life-cycle, social cohesion and social isolation. It employs data from three sources: a telephone survey collected from residents in 2001, a series of face-to-face interviews and 2001 Census data. The data are analysed statistically using a mixed model approach. The results show that mobility is an important feature of Saskatoon, and that a significant difference exists in the length of residency among the three neighbourhood clusters. However, the analysis indicates that there is no relationship between residential mobility and well-being as measured by self-reported quality of life and health.     

Volunteerism and residential longevity in Saskatoon,Saskatchewan, Canada

This paper examines volunteerism across three neighbourhood types that are differentiated by socio-economic status (SES) in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. The three neighbourhood types are defined as Low, Middle and High SES. The study used data collected from two telephone surveys (n = 968 in 2001, n = 997 in 2004) using random-digit dialling, together with in-depth interview data collected from a selected set of survey participants (n = 90). Neighbourhood type and length of residence are shown to have a strong bearing on volunteerism. The interview data illustrates that the quality of volunteer activity that residents engage in differs across neighbourhood types.

Quality of Life Perceptions and Directions for Urban Regeneration in Hong Kong

Urban regeneration can be an effective tool to promote sustainability and enhance macro-level quality of life if the principles of encouraging participation, building community character, advancing equity, improving environment and enlivening the economy are observed. Through the assessment of various quality of life indicators related to these five basic principles for sustainable urban regeneration by the public, private and community sectors, this paper finds that Hong Kong falls far short of realizing these fundamental principles. There are also considerable discrepancies between the public and non-public (private and NGOs) sectors in terms of evaluating existing quality of life issues and perceiving their relative priorities. The private and community sectors tend to have lower rating of existing situation and consequently a longer priority list. On the contrary, the public sector seems to be more complacent with the existing quality of life situations and has a much shorter priority list. The public sectors more relaxed attitude coupled with a top-down executive-led polity mean that Hong Kong will probably have a long way to go toward sustainable urban regeneration.     

Quality of Life Perceptions and Directions for Urban Regeneration in Hong Kong

Urban regeneration can be an effective tool to promote sustainability and enhance macro-level quality of life if the principles of encouraging participation, building community character, advancing equity, improving environment and enlivening the economy are observed. Through the assessment of various quality of life indicators related to these five basic principles for sustainable urban regeneration by the public, private and community sectors, this paper finds that Hong Kong falls far short of realizing these fundamental principles. There are also considerable discrepancies between the public and non-public (private and NGOs) sectors in terms of evaluating existing quality of life issues and perceiving their relative priorities. The private and community sectors tend to have lower rating of existing situation and consequently a longer priority list. On the contrary, the public sector seems to be more complacent with the existing quality of life situations and has a much shorter priority list. The public sector’s more relaxed attitude coupled with a top-down executive-led polity mean that Hong Kong will probably have a long way to go toward sustainable urban regeneration.     

Examining the Effects of Perceptions of Community and Recreation Participation on Quality of Life

The study of quality of life remains a key area of interest for not only researchers but to society. Through research being completed in multiple disclines and from a multitude of perspectives, the need to understand the full breadth of quality of life is required in order for the further development of this research area. Through building on previous research completed on quality of life from multiple disclines, this study utilizes numerous objective and subjective indicators to model quality of life in a community in the southwest United States. Through the analysis of 352 completed surveys, it was found that the two strongest predictors of quality of life were community pride and community elements. Of interest is that a number of other indicators including recreation participation and length of residency in a community were found to have a negative relationship with quality of life.     

Perceptions of Life Quality among the Korean Mass Public: Unraveling their Dynamics and Standards

South Korea is widely known as an Asian model of economic development and democratization. Yet until now, research has not shown whether the country’s successful transition to democracy and market capitalism has enabled ordinary citizens to experience a life of happiness and satisfaction in their private and public lives. To address this question, this study analyzes a 2002 Euromodule survey of the Korean electorate designed to appraise the quality of life as a whole and in its various important domains. Results of the analysis reveal that a substantial minority of South Koreans still leads undesirable lives full of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Furthermore, among the socioeconomically deprived, more people report deteriorations rather than improvements in their living conditions over the past five years. On the basis of these findings, we conclude that the surging forces of democratization and marketization can hinder ordinary people from experiencing a better quality of life by motivating them to compare themselves with other people in better situations to a greater extent than they did under past circumstances.     

An Exploratory Analysis of Societal Preferences for Research-Driven Quality of Life Improvements in Canada

Research in the humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS) tends to have impacts that enhance quality of life (QOL) but that are not amenable to pricing in established markets. If the economic value of ‘non-market’ research impacts is ignored when making the business case for HASS research, society will under-invest in it. My goal in this research was to quantify priorities and tradeoffs Canadians were willing to make between broad QOL attributes. A national sample (N = 1,612; 14,571 observations) cleaved into five distinct latent classes, each of which varied according to their preferences and willingness to pay for QOL impacts. One class, comprising 21% of the sample, placed a strong priority on QOL indicators relating to people, community, and culture, and was willing to pay, on average, 892 per household per year for improvements across a full range of QOL attributes. While willing to pay892 per household per year for improvements across a full range of QOL attributes. While willing to pay 1,393 per household per year in total, a second segment, comprising 20% of the sample, focused heavily on benefits more likely to be derived from science and technology research. Willingness to pay for specific and aggregate improvements amongst the balance of the sample was lower. Diverse preferences regarding potential QOL impacts suggest that researchers will need to consider both the source and magnitude of public benefits arising from HASS research in the future.     

Surviving the Transition: Trends and Perceptions of Crime in South Africa

Crime and violence have dominated South Africa's transformation over the past two decades. High crime rates cause widespread feelings of insecurity and fear which undermine popular confidence in the democratisation process. Considering both trends and public perceptions, this paper explores changing crime levels over the past decade, elaborating on the problems associated with crime statistics in South Africa, and the salience of the transition for current crime levels. Data is drawn from official police statistics and from victimisation and other surveys. Crime has been increasing gradually in South Africa since 1980. It is, however, since 1990 and not more recently as is popularly believed, that levels have risen sharply. An examination of the statistics shows that despite general increases, not all crimes have been committed with equal frequency and not all areas of the country are similarly affected. These trends are a product of the political transition and are associated with the effects of apartheid and political violence, the breakdown in the criminal justice system and more recently, the growth in organised crime. High crime levels are taking their toll on South Africans. Surveys show that crime rather than socio-economic issues now dominates people's concerns, and that fear of crime is increasing. Currently, fewer people feel safe and believe the government has the situation under control than in previous years. Faced with widespread unemployment on the one hand, and the prospects of development on the other, levels of property crimes will probably continue to increase. While violent crime levels should decline over the medium term, improved relations with the police and a culture of reporting crimes like rape and assault may result in more crime being recorded.     

Quality of Life in Macau,China

We report the initial findings of an ongoing, long-term investigation into subjective quality of life in Macau, a Special Administrative Region of China. Data were collected via quarterly public surveys (2007 to 2009; n = 8,230), as part of the Macau Quality of Life Report. The main aims of the study were to: (a) ascertain the public’s satisfaction with life and with the regional situation in Macau; (b) confirm the utility of the International Wellbeing Index (IWI) as a measure of subjective life quality; and (c) contribute to ongoing discussion in the literature on quality of life in China. The data indicated moderate levels of personal (PWI = 64.4; range 63–66.7) and national (NWI = 59.7; 57.4–63.7) wellbeing across the study period, which implies that residents in Macau are generally satisfied with life. The lowest scores were reported in the first quarter of 2009, a period of great economic uncertainty in Macau and the world, but were positioned within the normative range. The IWI demonstrated good psychometric performance, consistent with previous studies in China and the West, which confirmed its utility. These findings are discussed in relation to the IWI’s theoretical underpinnings and the literature.     

Quality of Life in Jasper,Alberta

This paper describes and explains citizen beliefs andattitudes about the quality of life in Jasper, Albertain the summer of 1997. We report on 447 surveyrespondents' satisfaction with a wide variety ofaspects of their community and their lives, the bestand worst things about living in Jasper, and thethings they would change first to improve the qualityof their lives. There was not much enthusiasm foruse-fees or the value received from tax dollars.Fifteen new indices of satisfaction with fundamentalaspects of people's lives were created. Happiness,life satisfaction and overall satisfaction with thequality of life were explained from a limited set of14 variables, providing comparisons with results fromseven other surveys taken over nearly 20 years.Finally, we used a simple linear model to account for63% of the variance in life satisfaction scores, 44%of the variance in satisfaction with the quality oflife scores and 37% of the variance in happinessscores.     

Parallels Between Objective Indicators and Subjective Perceptions of Quality of Life: A Study of Metropolitan and County Areas in Taiwan

This study explores the consistency between objective indicators and subjective perceptions of quality of life in a ranking of survey data for cities and counties in Taiwan. Data used for analysis included the Statistical Yearbook of Hsiens and Municipalities and the Survey on Living Conditions of Citizens in Taiwan, both given for the year 2000. The Quality of life was examined in seven domains: medical services, domestic finances, work, education, leisure, public safety, and environmental quality. Subjective and objective rankings for each domain of quality of life for 23 areas (some areas are cities and some are counties) are compared. Analysis by means of nonparametric correlation coefficients indicates that there is no significant correlation between objective indicators and subjective perceptions, except in Education and Environmental Quality. Objective indicators of Environmental Quality (air pollution and garbage) are positively correlated with subjective satisfaction with residential environment. But inexplicably, higher levels of literacy and educational achievement are negatively correlated with satisfaction with the educational system. It may be considered that disparity in either average objective conditions or in average subjective perceptions may not adequately depict quality of life differences.

Tracing the Life of a Crime Category

This article traces the shifting meaning of “date rape” in US newspapers across a fourteen-year period. A crime category created by a niche feminist press, “date rape” originally referred to a form of intimate-partner violence, and has, more latterly, come to refer predominantly to an assault that occurs after a victim has had a drug, such as Rohypnol, surreptitiously slipped into her drink. Employing quantitative content analysis to explicate this shift, the article considers possible explanations for the changing meaning of “date rape,” including the applicability of the risk thesis and criminological theory on the de-politicisation of crime. Finally, I suggest that a feminist perspective allows us to recognise that “date rape” has been transformed from an issue of female disempowerment into a nebulous threat of limited ideological significance.     

Source,Method, and Surmise: Quality of Life in History

The purpose of the essay is to demonstrate that study of quality of life can explore eras before our own. There are caches of social data as early as the seventeenth century, and there were people who attempted to formulate social circumstances close to today’s concepts of quality of life. Data from England and Ireland are presented and analyzed.     

Ethnicity,Modern Prejudice and the Quality of Life

The aim of this investigation was to measure levels of ethnic or cultural background diversity, social cohesion and modern prejudice, and the impact of such diversity, cohesion and prejudice on the quality of life. Using a sample of 743 residents of Prince George, British Columbia, we identified diverse ethnic or cultural groups, and created several indexes of heterogeneous social networks and a measure of modern prejudice. Dividing the total sample into three roughly distinct groups containing, respectively, respondents self-reporting an ethnic or cultural background that was aboriginal, non-aboriginal visible minority or anything else, we discovered that all significant comparisons indicated that people with aboriginal backgrounds reported a generally lower quality of life than those in the other two groups. The quality of life scores of the other two groups were practically indistinguishable. Given the demographic structure of our sample, the revealed differences could not be attributed to differences in socio-economic classes. Members of the largest group of respondents tended to be most prejudiced and optimistic, people with aboriginal backgrounds tended to be least prejudiced and optimistic and people with visible minority backgrounds tended to be between the other two groups. Regressions revealed that a variety of ethnic/culture-related phenomena could only explain 8%, 9% and 10%, respectively, of the variation in scores for happiness, life satisfaction and satisfaction with the overall quality of life. When domain satisfaction scores were added to the set of predictors, we were able to explain 48%, 69% and 54%, respectively, of the variation in scores for happiness, life satisfaction and satisfaction with the overall quality of life. In the presence of the domain satisfaction scores, the scores on the ethnic/cultural related phenomena added only one percentage point of explanatory power for happiness and life satisfaction, and three percentage points for satisfaction with the overall quality of life. All things considered, then, it is fair to say that this project showed that ethnic or cultural background diversity, social cohesion and modern prejudice had relatively very little impact on the quality of life of our sample of respondents.     

Health Care Service Needs and Correlates of Quality of Life: A Case Study of Elderly Chinese Immigrants in Canada

This study explored the health care service needs and the major correlates of quality of life among 127 community-dwelling elderly Chinese immigrants in a western Canadian city. Participants were interviewed in their homes by trained, bilingual interviewers employing a structured questionnaire that covered a wide range of topics including health care service needs, living arrangements, health status, social network, life satisfaction, and socio-demographic information. Results demonstrated that ethnic nursing homes, senior centres that provide programs and services, and homemaker services were respondents’ major service needs. Multiple ordinary least-squares regression analysis revealed that respondents who emigrated from Mainland China and those who exhibited greater psychological well-being, reported being physically more mobile, perceived fewer service needs, and expressed satisfaction with the quality of their neighbourhood demonstrated higher levels of life satisfaction.     

Social Capital, Satisfaction and Quality of Life in the Workplace

This article is an empirical analysis of the relationship between social capital and satisfaction and quality of life in the workplace in Spain. Social capital has been defined as the set of cooperative relationships between social actors that facilitate collective action. This concept has been measured based on five dimensions: trust, social relations, commitment, communication and influence. An analysis has been carried out applying regression and causal models to determine the influence on satisfaction and quality of life at work of social capital dimensions and of characteristics of the worker, work environment and company or organization. The data is based on Spain's 2001 Quality of Life at Work Survey. The results of the analysis indicate that the models applied are significant, which confirms the examined propositions. Higher levels of social capital imply greater levels of satisfaction and quality of life at work. Social capital is a better predictor of quality of life at work and job satisfaction than the characteristics of the worker, the company or organization, and the work environment.     

Family Life Quality and Emotional Quality of Life in Chinese Adolescents with and Without Economic Disadvantage

Chinese secondary school students (N = 2758) responded to measures of perceived family life quality (parenting quality and parent–child relational quality) and emotional quality of life (hopelessness, mastery, life satisfaction and self-esteem). Parenting quality included different aspects of parental behavioral control (parental knowledge, expectation, monitoring, discipline and demandingness as well as parental control defined in terms of indigenous Chinese concepts), parental psychological control, and parental responsiveness whereas parent–child relational quality included satisfaction with parental control, child’s readiness to communicate with the parents, parental trust of the child, and child’s trust of the parent. Results showed that parenting quality and parent–child relational quality in poor families were generally poorer than those of non-poor families and the differences were more pronounced in paternal parenting quality and father–child relational quality than in maternal parenting quality and mother–child relational quality. Emotional quality of life of adolescents experiencing economic disadvantage was also found to be poorer than that of adolescents not experiencing economic disadvantage. The present findings replicate the previous research findings in the literature and generate a pioneering dataset based on Chinese adolescents at Secondary 2 level in Hong Kong.     

Materialism and Quality of Life

An attempt is made in this paper to establish a foundation for a theory of materialism and quality of life. The theory posits that overall life satisfaction (quality of life) is partly determined by satisfaction with standard of living. Satisfaction with standard of living, in turn, is determined by evaluations of one's actual standard of living compared to a set goal. Materialists experience greater dissatisfaction with their standard of living than nonmaterialists, which in turn spills over to overall life causing dissatisfaction with life in general. Materialists experience dissatisfaction with their standard of living because they set standard of living goals that are inflated and unrealistically high. These goals set by materialists are more influenced by affective-based expectations (such as ideal, deserved, and need-based expectations) than cognitive-based ones (such as predictive, past, and ability based expectations). Materialists' ideal standard-of-living expectations are influenced by social comparisons involving remote referents, more so than comparisons involving standards that are situationally imposed. Examples of situationally-imposed standards are perceptions of wealth, income, and material possessions of family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and so on. In contrast, examples of standards based on remote sources are perceptions of standard of living of others in one's community, town, state, country, other countries; perceptions of standard of living of others based on gender, age, education, ethnicity, occupation, and social class. This tendency to use remote referents in social comparisons may account for materialists' inflated and value-laden expectations of their standard of living. Materialists' deserved standard-of-living expectations are influenced by the tendency to engage in equity comparisons involving income and work. Thus, materialists compare themselves with others that seem to have more income and worked no harder. These equity comparisons generate feelings of inequity, injustice, anger, or envy. These emotions may also account for materialists' inflated and value-laden expectations of their standard of living. Materialists' standard-of-living expectations based on minimum needs are influenced by the tendency to spend more than generate income. This proclivity to overconsume and underproduce may be partly responsible for materialists' inflated and value-laden expectations of their standard of living.     

Multidimensional Quality of Life: A New Measure of Quality of Life in Adults

This paper presents a new measure for assessing quality of life (QOL) –the Multidimensional Quality of Life (MQOL)– and describes its derivation, characteristics, structure and several applications. Reasons for developing the MQOL include the restricted range of assessed domains and the heavy emphasis on health in many standard assessment tools. The MQOL was derived by meaning probes into QOL in different samples. It is a 60-item self-report tool of high reliability and validity covering various themes and forming, in line with factor and cluster analyses, 17 scales that constitute five factors according to confirmatory factor analysis. It has been applied with thousands of individuals, in English, Hebrew, Russian and Arabic, and is adequate for healthy and physically or mentally sick individuals, under regular or challenging circumstances. Described studies present findings in samples of sick or healthy individuals (e.g., unemployed, members of a collapsing Kibbutz); relations between the MQOL and coping strategies in partners of sick individuals; and interrelations of overall and scale scores in new and old immigrants. Conclusions focus on the structure of the MQOL, the specificity of coping effects, and the stabilizing mechanisms of QOL.