Quality of Life and Impressions of Quality of Life of Migrants to Chennai: A Factor Analysis Approach

Abstract

This paper has the purpose of assessing quality of life of migrants of Chennai city using 14 variables measured with Likert-type of scaling in a factor analysis. As many as 305 randomly chosen migrant-respondents from across the city have been interviewed using a custom-designed, structured questionnaire in 2012. The analysis has yielded two very neat and significant factor dimensions, labeled as 'Quality of Life Dimension' and 'Well-being in Life and Work Dimension'. The two factors, retained in the analysis using the eigenvalue criterion, explain a cumulative variance of 49.434 per cent. The rotated factor scores have shown that 47.4 per cent of the migrants of Chennai are on the better side of quality of life whereas 45.6 per cent of them are on the higher side of well-being in their life and work. In their revealed perceptions of quality of life and well-being in life and work, there is yet much to be accomplished and there are challenges in city life they could face up to. Keywords: Quality of life, Well-being, Life and work, Megacities, Urbanization, Migrants of Chennai, Factor Analysis Approach I. Introduction A more realistic vision of future population flows concerns migration to and from cities. In 2008, half of the worlds population was in urban areas. Most of the expected population growth over the next few decades will be predominantly urban, and basically concentrated in of the developing world (Haydea Izazola and Alan Jowett, 2008, www.populationenvironmentresearch.org/seminars.jsp). One third of these cities population lives in slums, with precarious housing and limited or nonexistent access to basic services. The crowded also suffer from severe air pollution, which affects not only the urban poor, but urban populations in general. These are also expected to suffer the effects of climate change in the future. For most people in urban areas quality of life has been threatened (for example, Cutter 1985; Hemmasi, 1994; 1995). Different aspects quality of life assume varying degrees of importance when it comes to migration processes. Quality of life is an active arena for interdisciplinary research, attracting scholars from planning, geography, sociology, political science, economics, and other disciplines. Helburn (1982:445) has asserted that because 'quality of life' as a policy goal is attached to place, it is a goal of which spatial scientists must be cognizant, and to which planners and geographers can make important contributions. Cutter (1985) drew attention to the subject of quality of life in her monograph, Rating Places: A Geographers View on Quality of Life. Awareness of spatial and temporal variations in the quality of life can enable policy makers and planners to monitor changes and to devise more effective policies to address persisting inequalities (Hemmasi, 1994; 1995). Numerical and statistical methodology for creating comparative quality of life indexes is still evolving. Techniques for developing composite quality of life indexes include simple rankings of places, calculation of standard scores, scaling methods, and factor or principal components analysis (Dasgupta and Wea1e, 1992; Park, 1985; Hall, 1984; Tata and Schultz, 1988; Stover and Leven, 1992; Ram, 1982). For some migrants to the cities, especially for the poorest and the less educated, their priority may be for guaranteeing an income to sustain their families, while neglecting quality of life concerns. In most of the developing countries, people live with little or no concern for quality of life; yet it is largely for the reason of improving their lives, towards a certain level of quality of life, migrants have left their safer homes behind and have suffered in unimaginable ways in the before they could actually make some quality out of their lives and work. Quality of life has been an evolving field of research, in which several conceptual identification and empirical measurement problems exist. So-called objective socioeconomic variables, such as educational attainment and median income are relatively widely published for geographical areas and social groups. However, quality of life as a concept also evokes subjective perceptual or valuative aspects of human existence which are less commonly reported. The current study is devoted to such a subjective, perceptual aspects of urban life and work, in Chennai city. The effort in this paper is however less towards developing an index of quality of life but more towards understanding what the migrants of Chennai City think, and perceive, of their quality of life and whether or not it has improved in their perceived notions of their life and work. For