Call for Chapters: Best Practices in Community QOL Indicators

Call for Chapters
Special Volume on
Community Quality-of-Life Indicators: Best Practices V
Published by Springer in the new
Best Practices in Quality-of-Life Research Book Series

Volume Focus: This volume will publish best practices of community quality-of-life indicators projects. The first volume was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2004 (edited by M. Joseph Sirgy, Don Rahtz, and Dong-Jin Lee). The second volume was published by Springer in 2006 (edited by M. Joseph Sirgy, Don Rahtz, and David Swain). The third and fourth volumes were published by Springer (visit www.springer.com and type “Community Quality-of-Life Indicators” in the Search window) and the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (both edited by M. Joseph Sirgy, Rhonda Phillips, and Don Rahtz).

For the fifth volume, we are seeking excellent case studies that can be used by community planners, policy makers and others as good examples or “prototypes” of community quality-of-life indicator projects. Papers dealing with theoretical issues in planning, developing, and using community quality-of-life indicators are not suitable for this volume. Instead, they should be sent for review and possible publication in Social Indicators Research (SIR) or Applied Research in Quality-of-Life (ARQOL). The fifth volume will be published in the new book series, Best Practices in Quality-of-Life Research. The book series editor is Dr. Dave Webb of the University of Western Australia.

Volume Editors: M. Joseph Sirgy (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, USA), Rhonda Phillips (Arizona State University, USA), and Don Rahtz (College of William and Mary, USA)

Submission Deadline: December 31st, 2009

Submit to: M. Joseph Sirgy, Department of Marketing, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0236, USA. Tel: 540.231.5110. Fax: 540.231.3076. E-mail: sirgy@vt.edu

Submission Guidelines:

• The paper should be typed in either Arial or Times Roman, font size 10-12 with a margin of 1 inch on all sides.
• The paper should be typed either 1½ or double-spaced.
• Paper length should not exceed 30 pages in total including references, tables, and figures.
• Reference style: American Psychological Association (APA) style is preferred.
• E-mail attachment is the preferred mode of submission. Submit paper electronically to sirgy@vt.edu.
• All submissions should be original and not previously published. The submitted paper should not be submitted simultaneously to other publication outlets.

Guidelines for Paper Selection and Final Manuscript Preparation:

• Each paper will be subjected to a review by 2-3 referees who are experts in the field.
• The editors in consultation with the referees will make the final decision concerning acceptance or rejection.
• Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent out by the end of January 2010.
• It is very likely that the editors will request changes to the accepted papers based on the reviewers’ suggestions. We will forward a production schedule once all papers are reviewed.
  

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Child Well-Being Expert Consultation Summary from Ferran Casas

Ferran Casas provided the following summary to the ISQOLS listserve that I think many of us are interested in. Thank you very much for summarizing the conference, and special thanks to ISQOLS (the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies) for the good work they do. (If you're not a member, please check them out!)

Child Well-Being Expert Consultation

Co-organized by UNICEF IRC / OECD / European Commission

Paris 25 to 27 May 2009

During 3 days, 72 experts from 22 different countries and international organisations met to discuss the topic of indicators to assess child well-being in international perspective. Altogether we were 17 OCDE experts, 4 from UNICEF, 2 from the EC, 9 from universities from 7 different countries, 23 representing ministries or national statistics institutions, and 17 from international NGOs and other organisations.

Among these 72 experts, 4 are ISQOLS members: K. Land, F. Casas, L. Camfield and Asher Ben-Arieh.

Agenda included 9 sessions, 7 of them devoted to 1or two presentations of outstanding experts; one session of group discussions and one summing up session. Detailed agenda is available in www.oecd.org/els/social/childwellbeing  

All experts’ presentations were extremely interesting, and debates at the end of each session were very enriching, although several disagreements among participants were obvious.

According to OCDE experts, states are investing huge amounts of money on their children and there are few indicators systems appropriated to evaluate outcomes of such huge investments.

Some experts placed emphasis on the need of helping states to identify and organise data collection having a consensus they are useful for policy-making. That is related to availability of more evaluative comparable measures or indicators (versus descriptive indicators). For one Swedish expert “satisfaction” measures, though evaluative, are not “reasonable political goals”, and “aspiration levels should not interfere in the measure of children’s lives”. This same expert criticized the concept of “well-being” and proposed to use “level of living” defined as the individual command over resources… through which she can control and consciously direct her living conditions, which “naturally” includes positive indicators.

One OCDE expert underlined that many UNICEF indicators are advocacy relevant but “less policy relevant”. This expert also stated that little is known about child determinants of subjective indicators and therefore they are not including these indicators. In fact, in a forthcoming OECD publication (Enhancing Child Well-Being) a chapter devoted to a new system of indicators of Children’s Well-Being has already been included. The system focuses on both present and future outcomes for children.

Some participants pointed out that evaluation of child well-being should be not only relevant for policy-making, but also for children. Many experts insisted in the need of much more information about children’s lives in international perspective in a systematic and continued way “beyond survival”.

The concept of “subjective well-being” of children was probably the most debated and controversial. Some participants were not happy using “subjective” indicators. But what “subjectivity” of data means for different participants remained rather unclear. Many participants agreed to collect data from children and to consider children as unit of observation. How to collect that data was controversial and some insisted in how difficult is to get good quality data from younger children. Any data provided by children is “subjective”? “Subjective” child indicators refer to “subjective feelings” of children? The difference between “subjective” instruments to collect data from children and “subjectivity” of a complex social reality was pointed out. Children’s well-being indicators is a young field of research. And different meanings of “well-being” are included in it. Additionally, it was also pointed out that the perspective of different social agents involved in child well-being should be taken into account and even included in the measurement, as components of a complex reality. It was recalled that Campbell, Converse and Rodgers (1976) defined as well-being including perceptions, evaluations and aspirations of people.

Examples were given that sometimes indicators of efficiency of the school system do not correlate with satisfaction of children with the school system.

An UNICEF representative stated that most exiting indicators do not capture emerging problems of children (i.e.: children in institutions) and that we need child well-being data that allows for micro-analysis.

An interesting point that raised a debate is the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage and of child well-being. Questions were raised about intergenerational transmission of income, wealth or school results. An OECD expert presented results showing that intergenerational “mobility” may be very different when analysing income: In some countries parents’ income are extremely related to children’s (France, USA, UK, Italy), but in some others are not (Norway, Australia).

The Irish project “Giving Children a Voice” presented an innovative research method to catch what is the meaning of “well-being” among children.

Many innovative ideas and experiences were presented about measuring child well-being using “positive” indicators. One expert stated that perhaps the best predictor of children well-becoming is children’s well-being.

Ferran Casas

As always, please send me your conference summaries and notes to share with others! There are too many good conferences for any of us to attend all of them -- your impressions and learnings are needed by many.

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Impact of Public Services on Quality-of-Life Indicators

I've been reading Exploring the Impact of Public Services on Quality of Life Indicators (PDF), a research paper from the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York in the UK. The April 2009 paper, authored by Adriana Castelli, Rowena Jacobs, Maria Goddard, and Peter C. Smith, sets out to understand "the degree to which Public Service Organisations (PSOs) can influence a range of aspects of the quality of life of citizens across a broad range of measures both within and outside their usual domains of influence."

They took a set of quality-of-life indicators, and examined them across a number of small geographies and looked for the impact of public policies on these indicators. They found that public policy influenced people's quality of life, that real differences exist at the neighborhood level, and that the impacts of public policies often extended beyond the public service organisation's particular focus.

And they reinforced the importance of building social capital at the neighborhood level.

All in all, a serious study addressing matters important to those of us involved in community indicators work and public policy advocacy. More information about the study follows if you click the "Read More" link ...

From their introduction:

• The fundamental aim of public services is to improve the quality of life of citizens. The main objective of this study was to investigate the influence of public service organisations (PSOs) on aspects of quality of life (broadly measured) of citizens at a local level.
  

• Quality of life is a multi-dimensional concept incorporating facets such as health and social wellbeing,economic well-being, quality of education, level of security and safety, access to transport,and other aspects of life at a local level.
  

• Quality of life and well-being is linked closely to the notion of social capital which broadly concerns networks and shared values and understanding that exist within and between groups. Social capital highlights the importance of many aspects of the social associations that people encounter in their everyday life that may contribute to their well-being and quality of life. Public policy has a current emphasis on the role of social capital and the responsibility of organisations and agencies to work together to address the needs of local communities in terms of creating the conditions that enhance social capital.
  

• Moreover, there has been increasing policy emphasis on the responsibility of PSOs to promote the well-being of their area and this explicitly entails working with other agencies - even where boundaries are not coterminous - in order to develop sustainable community strategies thataddress the full range of quality of life issues.
  

• The increasing emphasis on notions of ‘community’ and ‘neighbourhood’ as levels at which wellbeing, community cohesion and social capital are fostered, implies that it is useful to look beyond the usual regional, local authority or health area level to smaller geographical areas.
  

They analyze a series of quality-of-life indicators across a number of geographies and look for the impacts of public policies on these indicators. Here's what they found:

We draw two sets of conclusions. First, from a methodological perspective, our work provides new evidence on the complex interactions between PSOs and the potential influence they may have on the quality of life of citizens at a local level. This is the first study of its kind to provide evidence on the sources of variation in quality of life indicators at small area level and to use advanced methods to disentangle this variation. We provide insights into whether the three approaches SUR, ML and MVML are suitable methods to examine the complex interplay between different hierarchical levels that are commonplace in all public services.

Second, from a policy perspective we have demonstrated that it is important to consider the influence of PSOs on quality of life in areas that fall outside their traditional domains. Moreover, our results give a flavour of the relative influence that health care and local government organisations may have on measures that span health, education, environment, safety, housing and others. We also illustrated the potential significance of considering the small area level in public policy making. The existence of substantial variation in quality of life measures at this level suggests that PSOs with responsibilities at higher level should be aware of the variation that exists at this level within their area and the differential impact their policies may have locally. As we outlined earlier, government policy highlights the importance of local communities and neighbourhoods and although there are no obvious PSOs that have responsibility for quality of life at small area level, the thrust of policy has been to encourage PSOs to become more responsive to local needs and to devolve to communities a greater role in decision-making, including the handling of resources at neighbourhood group and community level (Dept for Communities and Local Government, 2008). Also, as the literature suggests, fostering social capital can enhance the quality of life of citizens and protect them from social exclusion. Neighbourhood and community networks and relationships appear to play an important role in the creation and maintenance of social capital. Our results therefore suggest that policy attention to the local level may well be a fruitful approach if the aim is to enhance the overall well-being of citizens.

The study includes a list of the indicators they used, and some explanation about why they were chosen. I highly recommend reviewing this material.

I'd be interested in your comments.

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JCCI Releases 24th Annual Quality of Life Progress Report

JCCI released its Quality of Life Progress Report today at a press conference involving the Mayor of Jacksonville, the President of the United Way of Northeast Florida, the President of the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce, and Chair of the Community Foundation of Jacksonville, along with a number of community leaders and interested citizens.

This is the 24th annual edition of the report, which was first released in 1985. This pioneering effort has served as a model for community indicators reports around the world. (I'm really quite partial to it!)

You can read the report online and see the source data in Excel format that support the indicators. JCCI will be implementing a web-based indicator system during 2009 -- anyone who would like to receive a copy of the RFP, please drop me a line.

Here's one quick news report that shows how the community reacts to the annual release event:



Update: Here's a few more news stories:

Channel 4 News
The Florida Times-Union
WOKV
Jacksonville Daily Record

I'll add more as I run across them. Sometime soon we'll talk about media coverage and the relationships between reporters and community indicators efforts.

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Pike's Peak Indicators Report Update

I drew your attention last year to the Pikes Peak Quality of Life Indicators Report. Now they've released their 2008 report, and there's news about their planning for the 2009 update.

From Bettina at CopperBlog:

The 2008 Quality of Life Indicators Project ... was published this Fall. Click here to read the report online. In 2009, the report will be linked to the Dream City initiative. This is an exciting opportunity because now, as we have the tools and systems in place to determine where we are now, we can link key areas of performance to methods for producing a better quality of life in the future, and inspire decision-making and action.

That's good news, because the most important part of the process of developing a community indicators report isn't choosing the right indicators or publishing your first report; it's creating a sustainable project that becomes institutionalized in the decision-making processes throughout the community. So congratulations to the United Way and all others involved in the Pikes Peak project for continuing to move the effort forward. I'm looking forward to next year's update!

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Call for Proposals: Well-being and Place Conference

Well-being and Place: an International Conference

7th -9th April 2009, Durham University, United Kingdom

Organised and hosted by the Centre for the Study of Cities & Regions and the Social Wellbeing and Spatial Justice research cluster of the Department of Geography at Durham University in collaboration with the University’s Wolfson Research Institute.

Keynote speakers
Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Professor Tim Blackman, Director, Wolfson Research Institute, Durham University

Call for papers
Over the last ten years the targets of policy have expanded beyond the purely material and economic to embrace more subjective dimensions of human flourishing. Amongst a range of terms that have entered policy debates, ‘well-being’ has perhaps gained the greatest currency, incorporating both physical and cognitive elements and applied across individual and collective scales of analysis. It is clear that the definition, experience and determinants of well-being will vary in different kinds of places. However, the complex ways in which place and well-being interact remain relatively under-researched and under-theorised.

This conference will draw together research that explicitly links well-being and place. It will advance knowledge and stimulate future directions that are both creative intellectually and timely for contemporary policy debates. The organisers would like to include research from a range of different scales of analysis, across different substantive domains and from both policy-linked and more explorative approaches. The concept of place can be interpreted broadly from geographical locations (urban, rural, city, nation), everyday settings (home, work, school, street, leisure centres) and different scales (individual to international).

We welcome contributions from the academic and policy communities that focus on the relationship between well-being and place, broadly defined. The themes for the sessions will include:

· Home and well-being
· Theory, methods and ethics of well-being
· Transitions: well-being across this life course and the next
· Therapeutic places and unhealthy spaces
· Busy with a purpose; the importance of doing nothing
· Well-being in motion: flows, networks, relations
· and others

Abstracts (200 words) for paper presentations and proposals for panel discussions can be submitted up to 30th November 2008. Please send to Sara Fuller: s.k.fuller@durham.ac.uk. More details about registration and accommodation will be available shortly on the conference website (www.geography.dur.ac.uk/conf/wellbeingandplace).



Dr Beverley A Searle
Research Fellow
Department of Geography
University of Durham
South Road
Durham DH1 3LE

Telephone: 0191 334 1901
Fax: 0191 334 1801

New from The Policy Press:
WELL-BEING; In search of a good life?
Beverley A. Searle
For further details visit http://www.policypress.org.uk

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ISQOLS Resources

I received this note from Joe Sirgy and wanted to pass it on. I highly recommend connecting with International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) -- visit them today!

QOL Researchers,

Resources Available Through ISQOLS Website

I would like to point out a few resources available through ISQOLS’ website. First, ISQOLS listserv is an important communication tool. As you can see from the e-mail you receive from ISQOLS, the listserv is very active. The distribution list of the listserv is 2,000+. Subscription to the listserv is for free and it reaches a very wide audience of QOL researchers worldwide. It is the fastest and the most expeditious way to make announcements about new programs, books, conferences, workshops, new issues of our journals (SIR, JOHS, and ARQOL), job postings, QOL articles in the mass media, news about QOL researchers, etc. These announcements are then posted on ISQOLS’ homepage for a several months. Don’t hesitate to use the listserv to make announcements of programs, events, or any other piece of news you think the QOL research community at large may be interested in. Also get your QOL colleagues and graduate students to subscribe to listserv. Again, subscription is for free. All you need to do is send an e-mail message to isqols@vt.edu and say “subscribe to listserv” as your message (or something to that effect).

Second, the website is a goldmine of resources. I would like to draw your attention to the Resources site. It is divided into three sets of pages: (1) Bibliographic Resources, (2) Database Resources, and (3) Educational Resources. The Bibliographic Resources pages contain many references of books and review articles related to many QOL topics. It is indeed a resource goldmine, especially for those who would like to identify key works related to a particular QOL topic (e.g., subjective well-being, QOL and the elderly, children well-being, QOL and the disabled, QOL and the poor, environmental well-being, social well-being, economic/financial well-being, quality of work life, consumer well-being). Check out these resources and see what you might be missing from your own personal library. On the other hand, if you are aware of certain books and review articles related to a particular QOL topic that are not included on ISQOLS website, please let me know. Send a message to me (Joe Sirgy, sirgy@vt.edu) and I will make sure that these new items are incorporated into the Bibliographic Resources website.

The Database Resources pages contain many references to available data bases capturing QOL (or certain dimensions of QOL) of certain populations. Again, if you are aware of data bases that are available to the QOL research community that are not listed on that site, please let me know and I’ll make sure that the new references are incorporated and publicized on that site. The Educational Resources pages contain links to syllabi of QOL-related courses that you may find helpful—that is, if you are teaching (or planning to teach) a QOL-related course. Again, if you teach a QOL-related course and you would like to share your course syllabus with the QOL research community, send it to me, and I’ll post on that site. The Educational Resources site also contains lectures (video and/or PowerPoint slides). If you have video and/or PowerPoint lectures you would like to share with the QOL community, don’t hesitate to send these to me, and I’ll get them posted. One caveat: these pages are restricted to ISQOLS members only (those who paid their membership dues). If you have not paid your membership dues, then please do and take advantage of these resources.

Third, another goldmine resource is the Oral History page. That page contains a number of oral history videotaped interviews with some of our gurus (our most renowned QOL researchers such as Alex Michalos, Ed Diener, Abbott Ferriss, Richard Easterlin, David Myers, and Richard Estes). Professor Michael Frisch of Baylor University (USA) has labored hard to develop several of these videotapes. If you like to know more about our QOL research gurus, check out the Oral History page.

Fourth, under the Membership icon, there are additional resources you may find valuable. The Membership Directory is a handy tool for many in identifying contact information of QOL researchers and colleagues. The website does not only contain current membership rolls but also past rolls. Also, the Membership Expertise Database is another handy tool. There are two expertise data bases: current and non-current. These databases allow people to identify QOL researchers with expertise in certain areas of research (e.g., children well-being, elderly well-being, QOL and the poor, QOL and the disabled, subjective well-being, leisure well-being, family well-being, quality of work life, consumer well-being). If you are an ISQOLS member and have not completed an expertise profile, please do so (that is, if you like others to identify you as an expert in certain areas of QOL research). Also under the Membership icon there is a listing of research centers that specialize in various aspects of QOL research. If you are trying to identify a research organization that conducts QOL research to help you with your research agenda, consult that list. Conversely, if you do belong to a QOL research organization and you want to be included on that list (with links to your own website), you can do so by becoming an institutional member. Contact the Central Office at isqols@vt.edu for more details.

Fourth, ISQOLS website has its first certification program posted. This certification program allows QOL researchers interested in community indicators research to be trained and certified as experts in this area of research. This certification program is administered on-line. There is also a scholarship that can assist those in financial need apply for the certification. Contact me at sirgy@vt.edu if you’re interested.

Finally, you may want to take advantage of ISQOLS publications. We have our own journal (Applied Research in Quality of Life or ARQOL), two affiliated journals (Social Indicators Research [SIR] and the Journal of Happiness Studies [JOHS]), and a variety of monographs and conference proceedings. We also have Social Indicators Network News (SINET), which is our society’s official newsletter. To know more about these publications, visit ISQOLS website at www.isqols.org and click on Publications.

I hope you may find these resources helpful.

It is the beginning of a new academic year in the U.S. and many other universities in the world. On that note I wish you all a happy new academic year.

Joe Sirgy, Ph.D., ISQOLS Executive Director
Professor of Marketing at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, USA

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Conference and Call for Papers: Quality of Life

Fourth International Conference QoL 2008:
Quality of Life Improvement through Social Cohesion
Wrocław, 15-18 September 2008

SCOPE OF THE CONFERENCE
The QOL’2008 Conference aims at providing a forum for scientists to exchange up-to-date knowledge and also at setting goals for future research.

Three previous Conferences on Quality of Life Research, organised by us, took place in September 9-11, 1999, in September 18-20, 2002 and in September 14-16, 2005. List of publications after these conferences can be found on website: http://statystyka.ae.wroc.pl/english/publikacje.htm.

All aspects of quality of life will be considered, ranging from the description of the real data to fundamental methodological questions with particular emphasis on the various aspects of improving the quality of living.

The topics of the Conference include among others:
- social indicators and reporting,
- life’s domain oriented researches,
- social cohesion,
- comparative studies,
- economic aspects of quality of life,
- welfare society,
- philosophical and methodological aspects of quality of life research,
- health-oriented quality of life.
The Program Committee expects survey papers as well as original contributions.

ORGANISER
Department of Statistics at Wrocław University of Economics http://statystyka.ae.wroc.pl/english/index.html
General Chairman:
Prof. Walenty Ostasiewicz
Program Committee Members
Prof. Mario Bolzan
Prof. Stanisław Maciej Kot
Prof. Wolfgang Glatzer
Prof. Irena E. Kotowska
Prof. Achille Vernizzi

CALL FOR PAPERS
Abstracts of the conference papers written in English should be submitted to:
Dr Dariusz Biskup
e-mail: dariusz.biskup@ae.wroc.pl
The only restriction for the format of the abstracts and the full papers is they should be written in Microsoft Word 1997-2003.

OUTLINE OF CONFERENCE PROGRAM
September 15, 2008 (Monday):
Registration and Welcome Party
September 16-17 (Tuesday-Wednesday):
Sessions with English language
Evenings of Tuesday and Wednesday:
Banquet and social events
September 18 (Thursday):
Sessions with Polish language admissible

CONFERENCE SITE
“Wrocław” Hotel
Wrocław, Powstancow Slaskich str. 7
http://www.orbis.pl/en/orbishotels/wroclaw/hotel_orbis_wroclaw

REGISTRATION ON WEBSITE
Registration should be made by April 30, 2008. The registration form is available on the conference website: http://statystyka.ae.wroc.pl/qol2008. Deadlines given on website are not strict, because we still are waiting for new participants, but Organizing Committee is able reserve accommodation only for anybody registered till the end of April. Organizers will help later registered participants in finding accommodation.

CONFERENCE FEE
The conference fee will be 250 EURO (=900 PLN). This includes a copy of the conference proceedings, attendance at seminars, lunches, refreshments and the conference dinner.
The deadline for the payment is 31st of May, 2008.
Name of the bank: BANK ZACHODNI WBK S.A. 17 O/WROCLAW
Address of the bank: 50-373 Wroclaw, Powstanców Slaskich str. 145
The account number: PL 07 1090 2529 0000 0006 3400 0503 with title "QOL2008"
Recipient’s name: Akademia Ekonomiczna we Wroclawiu
Bank SWIFT code: WBKPPLPP

CONFERENCE LANGUAGE
The official language of the sessions in two first days of conference will be English. Last day Polish language is also admissible.

CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS
Accepted papers which will arrive before June 15 will be published in the conference proceedings. Selected papers will be published in the form of contributed volume.

ACCOMMODATION
It will be possible to make reservations for the “Wroclaw” hotel. Price for a single room is about 65 EURO per night or 40 EURO for a place in a double room.
It will be also possible to make reservations in a student hotel (about 15 EURO per night)
Details about the possible hotel reservations will be available at the conference website.
It is possible to make reservations for the “Wroclaw” hotel (http://www.orbis.pl/en/wroclaw/hotels/orbis_wroclaw). Price for a single room is about 65 EURO per night or 40 EURO for a place in a double room. It is also possible to make reservations in a student hotel (about 15 EURO per night).If you'd like to make a reservation, please send an email containing:1. Name of the person (persons) and number of places to be reserved. 2. Name of the hotel (“Wroclaw Hotel” or Student Hotel).3. Date of the arrival (not earlier than the 15th of September).4. Date of departure (not later than the 18th of September).5. Type of room (single or double).to dariusz.biskup@ae.wroc.pl till the end of April. After this deadline all the reservations will have to be done individually by the conference participants.

CORRESPONDENCE
All correspondence should be addressed to:
Dr Dariusz Biskup
Department of Statistics
Wrocław University of Economics
Komandorska 118-120
53-345 Wrocław, Poland
Tel. +(48 71) 36 80 356
Fax. +(48 71) 36 80 356
e-mail: dariusz.biskup@ae.wroc.pl

CONFERENCE NEWS
All the information on the Conference will be available at http://statystyka.ae.wroc.pl/qol2008.
The registered participants will be also informed about further details on the conference by e-mail.

Best regards
Cyprian KozyraCyprian.Kozyra@ae.wroc.pl

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Political Leadership and Sustainability

I read an interesting blog post this morning from Joe Swanson, who's apparently a candidate for political office in Wisconsin. I am not in Wisconsin, and do not publicly endorse candidates, and have never met Joe. I'm sharing with you what he wrote because of the clear way in which he outlined the need for community-based indicators of sustainability as a key influence in policy-making and political decisions.

In a post called simply "Sustainable Community", Joe wrote:

If we are to change the outcome of governmental process we must find a way to introduce logical and factual data into each and every decision. The process would need to be governed by criteria/indicator developed locally. This process would remove political consideration from the decision making process. It would evaluate decisions concerning communities by checking each decision against criteria designed by the community to best utilize human and natural resources lessening the burden on infrastructure and environment. This holistic approach would help insure that our communities remain sustainable, therefore insuring the economic, environmental, and human viability of our region.

He then defines "sustainability" for his readership as follows:

Sustainable development is often misinterpreted as focusing solely on environmental issues. In reality, it is a much broader concept as sustainble development policies encompass three general policy areas: economic, environmental and social. In support of this, several United Nations texts, most recently the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, refer to the “interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars” of sustainable development as economic development, social development, and environmental protection.

He also identifies fourteen steps in developing community indicators of sustainability. His list demonstrates a thoughtfulness in including a broad set of quality-of-life indicators in understanding trends in the community.

In all, it's a pretty good argument for locally-developed community indicators as necessary resources for public decision-making. Do your elected leadership feel the same way?

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Environment and Public Health Indicators

A new study, Tracking Health and the Environment: A Pilot Test of Environmental Public Health Indicators looks at the relationship between environmental indicators and public health measures. In the study, the Johns Hopkins Center for Excellence in Environmental Public Health Tracking assembled three sets of indicators to test the relationships.

From the abstract:

To advance the use of indicators, the Johns Hopkins Center for Excellence in Environmental Public Health Tracking piloted three pairs of indicators: 1) air toxics and leukemia in New Jersey, 2) mercury emissions and fish advisories in the United States, and 3) urban sprawl and obesity in New Jersey. These analyses illustrate the feasibility of creating environmental hazard, exposure, and health outcome indicators, examining their temporal and geographic trends, and identifying their temporal and geographic relationships. They also show the importance of including appropriate caveats with the findings. The authors' investigations demonstrate how existing environmental health data can be used to create meaningful indicator measures to further the understanding of environment-related diseases and to help prioritize and guide interventions. Indicators are the foundation of environmental public health tracking, and increased use and development of them are necessary for the establishment of a nationwide tracking network capable of linking environmental exposures and health outcomes.

Not surprisingly, I like the idea of wider use of indicators to understand trends and relationships. I also like the idea of trying to get outside of a single-field area of focus to look at the broader set of indicators to see the interrelationships.

This is an important step, but I suspect only a first step. As the work progresses, I would like to see greater studies on how public policy decision-making about land use and transportation planning, for example, or social service provisions, or economic development policy affect both environmental and public health indicators.

The message that community indicators practitioners understand instinctively and are trying to share with the world is that we live in an interconnected system where our actions have consequences. Only a comprehensive look at indicators of the quality of life in a community has a chance to understand where we are making progress, where we struggle, and how our decisions affect the future of our community.

Here's how the authors conclude their study:

Several lessons can be drawn from the development of the indicators presented in this paper. First, indicator development is restricted by the availability, reliability, and consistency of data. Second, multidisciplinary expertise and collaboration are needed to design and track indicators that will be useful for policy. Finally, because indicator projects may not be controlled studies, their results are often difficult to interpret. Great care must be taken in the communication of findings about environmental exposure and disease relationships to the public. Words should be carefully chosen, caveats should be highlighted and repeated, and clear legends should be placed on every graphic. For linkage indicators examining both hazard/exposure and outcomes, it must be emphasized that conjunction or lack thereof provides only exploratory and potentially suggestive data about distributions and trends. Controlled analyses are generally needed to draw firmer conclusions.

Read over the study, and keep forwarding these kinds of articles!

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JCCI Releases 23rd Annual Community Indicators Report

The 2007 edition of the Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI) Quality of Life Progress Report has been recently released. The 23rd edition outlines clear priorities for action for Jacksonville and Northeast Florida for the coming year.

The report includes 111 indicators that reflect trends in nine external environments: Achieving Educational Excellence; Growing a Vibrant Economy; Preserving the Natural Environment; Promoting Social Wellbeing and Harmony; Enjoying Arts, Culture and Recreation; Sustaining a Healthy Community; Maintaining a Responsive Government; Moving Around Efficiently; and Keeping the Community Safe.

Much of the data for the Quality of Life Progress Report is obtained from the records and documents of various public and private organizations. An annual opinion survey provides the remaining data.

At the release event, Ronald Autrey, chair of the 2007 Quality of Life Progress Report Review Committee and chair of the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce, presented the report to Mayor John Peyton and the citizens of Jacksonville.

The Florida Times-Union reported: Acknowledging what he called "externally imposed reductions to local funding," referring to Tuesday's approval of the property tax amendment, Ron Autrey outlined the findings of the Jacksonville Community Council Inc.'s 2007 Quality of Life Progress Report. Autrey, head of Miller Electric Co., and chairman of the report, spoke of the level of uncertainty the tax amendment will impose on the community's efforts to sustain the gains and to make improvements that are needed. The purpose of the annual report, he added, is "to help keep important issues on the public's mind."

Local television added that the good news is that the community cares. "Every one of those negative trends is being looked at, by government, by business, by concerned individuals and nonprofit agencies," Autrey said.

Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (JCCI) is a nonprofit civic organization that seeks to improve the quality of life in Northeast Florida. Since 1975, JCCI has convened diverse groups of citizens each year to identify significant community issues for in-depth study. Its goal is to increase public awareness and promote positive action. JCCI’s study process and indicator reports have served as models for hundreds of communities around the world. For more information, visit the JCCI web site at http://www.jcci.org/.

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"Community of Opportunity"

I really liked the description of what the Northwest Indiana Quality of Life Indicators Report has to say about the community. The Northwest Indiana Quality of Life Council has been using the indicators to promote progress in the region, and asks in this article published by the Michigan City News-Dispatch, November 18, 2007:

Is Northwest Indiana a "Community of Opportunity"? If not, how do we ensure that all residents have an opportunity to succeed and achieve some form of financial well being and security?

The indicator report uses some interesting categories to advance conversation and action in the community, and supports a blog for ongoing discussion about the indicators. Blog topics include everything from income inequality to climate change. It's worth checking out.

The "Community of Opportunity" conversation continues:

The Quality of Life Indicator "Community of Opportunity" looked at issues of income and poverty in Northwest Indiana. It found that we are an area of vast economic contrasts.
The Quality of Life report urged the Northwest Indiana community to reduce poverty by 20 percent by 2010. The report acknowledges this challenge will require the public, private and non-profit sectors to work together on a solution.

Together, we can create a community of opportunity and we will all benefit in the long run. But it all starts with education!

That's a message that I think will resonate with many of us in our communities.

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Happiness, Quality of Life, and What We Measure

We've been discussing happiness and economic prosperity and the different kinds of happiness and misery indicators we could be measuring. Now Newsweek explains why money doesn't buy happiness and sets up an interesting question for community indicators practitioners.

First of all, the research suggests that happiness buys money, but not the other way around.

The True Ancestor blog puts it this way:

... [In] Stumbling on Happiness, [Harvard psychologist Daniel] Gilbert notes that "wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter."

The Gross Domestic Product in the U.S. has nearly tripled since World War II, ... but people's sense of well-being has stayed virtually unchanged. Economic indicators turn out not to be such good predictors of happiness.

Interestingly, young people who are happy go on to earn more throughout their lives than do their unhappier counterparts. No chicken-and-the-egg conundrum here: the chicken that is happiness lays the golden egg that is economic well-being.

With the upcoming international forum on gross national happiness coming up, the question of why we're measuring what we're measuring is an interesting one. Legendary indicators guru David Swain frames the issue this way:

What intrigues me the most about the comparison of QOL [Quality of Life] and GNH [Gross National Happiness] concepts of measuring is the difference in the understanding of “happiness.” As I’m coming to understand it, in Western QOL thinking, from a community/national perspective, happiness is concerned with matters “external” to the human mind/spirit. Business oriented marketing/happiness measurement is concerned primarily with material goods and services, what people want and will buy. Community oriented quality of life issues are concerned with what groups of people can do collectively to improve the external environment, excluding “internal” issues such as faith and spirituality. Again, as I’m coming to understand, Eastern, specifically Buddhist GNH thinking makes no such distinction between external and internal, between material and spiritual. So, measures of happiness are defined quite differently.

Many, if not all, of our community indicators reports measure economic indicators. Sustainability efforts describe the intersection of people, place and prosperity (or economy, environment and equity or whatever the latest alliterative formulation might be with a Venn diagram thrown in). But while we keep getting more and more creative in our development of measurements of the external environments, few (if any) community-level indicators reports seek to measure happiness.

Is that by design, or oversight? How would you respond?

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Call for Chapters Deadline Extended

The deadline for the call for chapters for the Community Quality-of-Life Indicators: Best Cases IV book has been extended to December 30, 2007. Here's a great chance to tell your story. For more information, see the previous post or contact:

M. Joseph Sirgy
Department of Marketing, Pamplin College of Business
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0236, USA.
Tel: 540.231.5110.
Fax: 540.231.3076.
E-mail: sirgy@vt.edu

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Interrelatedness of QOL Indicators

Wayne Seville has an excellent post at his blog, Greetings from Route 50. His piece on Quality of Life demonstrates clearly how arts and culture is linked with medical care and community health which is linked to economic development which is linked to higher education and so forth. But he says it much better, and he has pictures, so I'd like to send you over there to take a look.

These conversations are happening across the world. In Harlingen, Texas, folks are wrestling (rasslin'?) with what quality of life means for their community. Erie, Pennsylvania is looking at national quality of life rankings (PDF) as a key piece to economic revitalization. The City of North Las Vegas, Nevada is asking its residents to take a quality of life survey as part of its efforts to see if they are meeting their strategic plan.

And it's not just in the U.S. Just this week, Hong Kong is paying attention to measures of the quality of life, and Toronto is looking at quality-of-life impacts related to budget cuts while Montreal gloats.

You have new urbanists looking at quality of life factors to encourage sustainable neighborhoods, and environmentalists calling on quality-of-life reasons to stop drilling in neighborhoods.

All in all, it's a great time to be reaching out and pulling together and building networks of people interested in measuring the quality of life in communities. It's that important, and the time is now.

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EurLife Quality of Life Indicators Database Updated

The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions sent out a news release that caught my eye.

EurLife database of quality of life indicators: The database, which deals with the objective living conditions and subjective well-being of European citizens, has been updated. New indicators have been added, as well as data for more recent years. National coverage has been expanded to include the 27 EU Member States and Turkey. The database will be updated again in 2008 with results from the second European Quality of Life Survey.

So I went and checked out the information provided in their database. I found it surprisingly useful. In the health domain, for example, I looked up infant mortality. I found the rates in tabular format, 1990-2005, for each country in Europe plus an EU-15 and EU-25 rate. Some of the data points were unavailable, but the chart was sufficiently complete to see the incredible progress Turkey, Romania, and Hungary have made. (The descriptor of the measure was perhaps a little blunt -- yes, you are measuring dead babies, but still ....)

The links to the data sources were also helpful. There's a nice selection of data -- besides the Health element, there's Employment, Income Deprivation, Education, Family, Social Participation, Housing, Environment, Transport, Safety, Leisure, and Life Satisfaction. The last indicator is "Happiness", which is an interesting one to include with some of the other, more concrete measures.

The Environment indicators took me by surprise. This is about your living environment, the built environment, and only a little about the natural environment -- not whether the natural ecosystems are necessarily healthy, but whether you experience pollution or complain about the quality of the drinking water or complain about the lack of greenspace. The other environment indicators measure things like the distance to a cash machine, cinema, supermarket, nursery, or primary school, as well as the state of repair of the buildings near you.

The Social Participation indicators were a nice mix of involvement and social capital, including voting, participation in a series of activities, organizational membership, and involvement with neighbors. The leisure measures were also fun.

So take a look at the data -- even if you're not measuring indicators in Europe, you may find the data interesting for comparative purposes or to spark ideas about how to better measure the quality of life in your own community.

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Rural v. Urban Quality of Life Measures in Argentina

Last month we talked about rural and urban issues in measuring the quality of life. As mentioned in the previous post, core issues are often different.

I just ran across an interesting article titled "Ampliando el estudio de la calidad de vida hacia el espacio rural. El caso del Partido de General Pueyrredon, Argentina" (Extending the study of the quality of life to the rural space. The case of the Municipality of General Pueyrredon, Argentina.)

It helps to know Spanish for this article. From the abstract:

Concientes de la escasez de información referida a la calidad de vida en los asentamientos rurales, el propósito de esta investigación es impulsar la transferencia de la experiencia existente en el campo de los asentamientos urbanos hacia el hábitat rural.

En tanto, se propone un ejercicio de comparación entre Indicadores de Calidad de Vida para el espacio urbano y el espacio rural, procurando con esto poner en discusión la necesidad de ampliar los estudios hacia las áreas rurales en un contexto reconocido como de refuncionalización del espacio rural.

El recorte espacial considerado en el presente artículo corresponde al espacio rural del partido de General Pueyrredon localizado en la zona sudeste de la provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Intentando lograr esto el artículo se centra en resultados preliminares obtenidos mediante el uso de fuentes estadísticas oficiales provistas por el INDEC (fracciones y radios censales) y la elaboración de índices de calidad de vida que combinan las dimensiones educación, salud, vivienda y ambiente. Dichos índices se han conformado en técnicas certeras para el reconocimiento de los contrastes territoriales. En la representación de dichos contrastes ha sido de suma utilidad el empleo de sistemas de información geográfica, que mediante capas de información dan claridad a la interpretación de los procesos socioterritoriales.

Translated:

Knowing the shortage of information linked to the rural quality of life the intention of this investigation is to impel the transference of the existing experience in the urban field to the rural habitat. Consequently a comparison is proposed between the urban Quality of life indicator and the rural space trying to encourage the discussion of the need to extend the study towards the rural areas in a context of resignificance of the rural space.

The area of study in the present article corresponds to the rural space of the Municipality of General Pueyrredon located in the Southeastern zone of the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The paper focuses on preliminary results obtained by the official statistical organization called INDEC (census tracks) and the elaboration of a quality of life index that combines four dimensions: education, health, housing and environment. This index has been developed using accurate techniques for the recognition of territorial contrasts. The use of a geographical information system - which combines different layers of information - has been of supreme utility since it maps the contrasts and eases the interpretation of the social and territorial processes.

What I liked about the article was the careful construction of different indices to measure the quality of life for the urban and rural communities, and then mapping the results to show how the targeted index could tell you more about the population needs of the community. It drives home clearly the need to develop a community indicators system that reflects the actual lived experience of the people being measured.

The full article, in PDF format, is available here.

(As a side note, if you're interested in helping provide a more global perspective to the discussion of community indicators and would like to be a contributing blogger to this site in the language of your choice, please let me know. There's too much happening around the world now, and even more going to be happening after the Istanbul Declaration, to try to keep up with my limited language skills.)

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