Abstract
Urban quality of life (QOL) is a complex and multidimensional concept. A wide range of urban QOL assessment tools has been developed worldwide to measure and monitor the quality of urban life taking into account the particular conditions of cities/regions and the needs of their residents. This study aims to develop an urban QOL assessment tool appropriate for the context of Saudi Arabia (SA). For this purpose, this study developed and used a structured approach that consists of an in-depth analysis of 21 urban QOL assessment tools in use worldwide, combined with focus group analysis and feedback from a panel of experts. The results revealed that there is a lack of consensus among the existing tools regarding the usage of QOL indicators and domains, and that the majority of the tools demonstrate a lack of proper coverage of QOL subdomains. The results also show wide variations in the number of indicators used and that most of the examined tools are using objective measurable indicators. This study has identified 67 indicators distributed across 13 domains that constitute the core criteria of the proposed QOL assessment tool. The selected indicators and domains cover all the attributes of urban QOL and are evaluated by experts as important criteria to assess/measure QOL. Moreover, the results demonstrate the advantage of the developed framework and comprehensive list of criteria (CLC) as a structured and efficient approach to design better QOL assessment tools.
Highlights
Quality of life (QOL) has been investigated extensively in the past few decades, quality of life (QOL) as a discipline is still embryonic (Friedman, 1997)
The in-depth analysis of the 21 assessment tools resulted in several findings that have direct implications on developing the proposed QOL assessment tools
The results show that there is a lack of consensus regarding the selection and use of QOL indicators and domains
Summary
Quality of life (QOL) has been investigated extensively in the past few decades, QOL as a discipline is still embryonic (Friedman, 1997). Urban QOL can be defined as the general well-being of people and societies living in cities and the quality of the environment in which they live (Slavuj, 2011; Al-Qawasmi, 2020). From this perspective, urban QOL embodies both objective attributes (extraneous environmental and place attributes) and subjective attributes (individual insights and perception of the material and nonmaterial conditions). Subjective perception of the QOL is important because many crucial sides of people’s lives, such as the quality of the urban environment, feelings of security or social solidarity, sentimental attachment, Assessing Urban Quality of Life and the quality of neighborhood relationships, are hard to measure through objective indicators (Lora et al 2010). Many studies have criticized the use of subjective indicators of QOL as being unreliable and in many cases misleading because respondents tend to have lack of information, specific cultural manifestation of reality and biases, habitual differences, and variance in aspiration factor (Lora et al 2010)
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