Abstract
Although indicators are commonly used to measure/assess urban quality of life (QOL), there is no consensus in the literature on the core indicators of urban QOL. This paper aims to identify a set of key indicators that will be used to assess/measure urban QOL in the Saudi Arabia (SA) context. For this purpose, a three-round online Delphi procedure is used. A group of 92 local experts were asked to rate the importance of a set of pre-defined indicators in assessing/measuring urban QOL. The results reveal that the panel of experts reached consensus and agreed on the high importance of 53 indicators for assessing/measuring urban QOL. These indicators provide appropriate coverage of the three core dimensions of urban QOL: environmental, social and economic. However, the results also show that the social indicators are perceived as more essential than economic and environmental indicators. This finding has practical implications for designing and developing QOL assessment tools to better capture and measure urban QOL in the SA context. Furthermore, research findings also identified some methodological limitations associated with using the Delphi approach, which need to be addressed to ensure the development of comprehensive QOL assessment tools.
Highlights
Urban quality of life (QOL) is a notion that has been heavily examined in recent years. QOL is a widely used concept, there is no consensus in the literature on its definition, or how to measure or assess it [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The literature review resulted in identifying over 30 urban QOL assessment tools in use worldwide, from which a sample of 21 tools has been selected for analysis as listed in Table S1 in the supplementary material
Note: Round * = The Delphi round in which consensus is reached that indicator is important aspect of QOL. “1”, “2”, “3” is the round number in which consensus is reached, while “-” indicates no consensus is reached in the Delphi rounds
Summary
Urban quality of life (QOL) is a notion that has been heavily examined in recent years. QOL is a widely used concept, there is no consensus in the literature on its definition, or how to measure or assess it [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Many of these studies conceptualize and operationalize urban QOL as composed of a wide range of attributes that span across major thematic groups (called QOL domains and sub-domains) that cover the three dimensions of life: environmental, social, and economic [7,9,10,11] This conceptual model of urban QOL is becoming more popular as it aligns urban QOL with the urban sustainability discourse which dominates the field and overlaps with urban QOL in many aspects [2,11]
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