Exploring indicators coverage practices in measuring urban quality of life

Abstract

The paper develops and uses a structured coverage analysis approach to examine the usage of indicators and their ability to assess various quality of life (QOL) attributes in 15 urban QOL assessment tools. The results reveal a lack of consensus not only on the type and the optimal number of indicators for a tool, but also on the methods used to select and develop them. The results show that most of the tools tend to use almost incompatible sets of indicators. They also show that, in general, most of the examined tools reflect severe lack of representative coverage, which indicates that large portion of important sub-domains is not covered by any indicator, except for the economic-related domains. In addition, most of the tools reflect low-to-moderate comprehensive coverage, except for the economic dimension, which reflects the highest comprehensive coverage. The findings also suggest some conditions that can improve the process of selecting and developing a contextualised set of indicators. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the usefulness of using the proposed coverage analysis techniques as a structured approach to benchmark with best QOL assessment tools to improve the process of developing sets of QOL indicators for a particular urban context.