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.