Quality of Life in Rural Areas: A Set of Indicators for Improving Wellbeing

Abstract

Quality of life can be generally defined as people’s satisfaction with their lives and personal wellbeing. Contemporary literature agrees that dimensions such as health, education, employment, leisure, social relations, security, environment, landscape, and cultural heritage should be considered. Tourism serves as a stimulus for rural development, and assessing residents’ and tourists’ quality of life is relevant for local administrators of a tourist destination. Given the absence of quality-of-life models for individual municipalities, the research questions were aimed at the mapping of quality-of-life frameworks and the construction of a set of quality-of-life indicators for Alagna Valsesia. This research was conducted in 2023. The results of the research showed the possibility of constructing a modular model of indicator sets aimed particularly at decision making by territorial policymakers. The limitations of the research are related to the difficulty of finding different indicators in public platforms and, in the future, we would like to build a synthetic indicator replicable in other Piedmontese and Italian municipalities.