Ranking of Life Domains

5.3. Ranking of Life Domains

In order to explore the importance of housing among other life domains, respondents were asked to rank a set of 10 domains in a descending order according to the influence these domains have on their life starting from 1 for the most influential domain and ending with 10 for the least important domain. The domains comprised: access to transportation, culture and recreation, education, employment and income, family and social life, health, housing, natural environment, political environment and security and safety. Results have shown some connotations of uniformity within outcomes related to some domains such as political environment as well as security and safety. In spite of that, results in general have shown variations in ranking aspects related to QOL. This in turn reflects differences in people’s living conditions related to personal and locational attributes on the one hand, and the priorities and perceptions people hold regarding factors that affect their QOL on the other hand. This can be explained as a sign of significance of almost all aspects of life which agrees to a high degree with results obtained by Mallard et al (1997) who found that, unlike the case in many countries, QOL in Jordan seemed to be pervasively affected by nearly every life domain.

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Table 5.4 presents results of rankings awarded to domains and corresponding values obtained by each domain. It shows the two most frequent mode values (rank) given for each domain, the frequencies of these ranks and the ratios they comprise from the total number of ranks given for each domain. The table additionally shows sums and means of the calculated values corresponding to given ranks¹. In so doing, it concludes with the final rank that each domain obtained from assessing all these values, which in turn defines its level of importance or significance among all other domains.

The final outcome reflects to a reasonable extent the general impression one can get from personal observations and general public talks about life in Amman except for some aspects including in particular, transportation which was placed, unexpectedly, in a low rank. Transportation is believed to be one of the most significant problems that impact negatively on the life of people in Amman on a daily basis, and in almost all places and for all community groups. This in fact is a matter of public concern raised by several experts who had been interviewed during the study. Among those were employees in the Planning Unit of Greater Amman Municipality who stated that Amman suffers from a faulty transportation system which, accompanied by a poor infrastructure and public services system, may account for around 70% of the overall obstacles that challenge the quality of urban life in the city. This is because, unlike most other aspects that might be of significant concern for particular groups or community members, transportation is an issue that almost every community member deals with.

1 To calculate the corresponding values for domains, each rank was given a value from 1-10 that represents its significance. For example, rank 1 was given the value of 10, rank 2 given the value of 9 and so on until reaching rank 10 which was given the least value, 1. Values were multiplied by frequencies to obtain the final sum of values, from which the mean value was calculated. The sums and mean values formed the base for the final assessment and ranking of domains.

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The impression based on ranking results provokes two initial suppositions. The first is that there seems to be a general tendency towards valuing aspects that are of a more personal or individual dimension such as health, income and security over those of collective concern such as transportation, recreation and politics. The second remark that can be made is that most people tend to identify aspects of QOL from a notional or visionary point of view more than a practical and functional one. In such a view, subjective issues such as being safe, feeling healthy, having good relations and dealing pleasantly with others can be of higher weight than materialistic issues. This contradicts with opinions of experts and specialised people who seemed more rational and objective in defining QOL and naming the factors that affect it in a way that gives priority to issues that are in an unpleasant state and in need of improvement. The way people prioritise aspects of QOL had been referred to in several studies including the work of Lee (2008) who claimed that when assessing QOL from the perspective of individual subjective measurement, physical environmental assessment becomes less important than factors such as safety, prosperity, convenience and sociability issues. These findings indicate that from an individual subjective perspective, individuals may be more concerned with spiritual and perceptual perspectives than with environmental

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perspectives. Another comment that can be made is that the general trend of ranking reflects, in a way, the primacy of basic human needs comprising physiological and safety needs represented by health, income, security and housing followed by the need of belonging which is reflected in the domain of family and social life. Needs of esteem and self actualisation represented by recreation and political interests are the ones that ranked the lowest. Such trends reflect to a certain degree the inadequacy of basic needs among a wide sector of the community, and that many people are still concerned with their primary needs, as is the case with most developing countries.

Housing appeared to be of sound importance, occupying the fourth rank among all domains. This concurs with findings from different studies including that of Das (2008), who found that satisfaction based on condition of housing was strongly correlated with satisfaction from overall QOL. Besides, it can be noticed that housing as a domain seemed to be very close in terms of rank and value to family and social life, which reflects a general impression among people that housing is a key factor in maintaining family and social life, and vice versa.

Besides detecting the rank and corresponding value for each domain as a quantifying indication of importance, it was necessary to inspect the consistency and degree of confidence that can be built upon the outcomes of each domain. Measures of spread including standard deviation and variance were used for that purpose in addition to the use of box plots to display the median and inter-quartile ranges of distribution for each domain. Table 5.5 presents mean², standard deviation and variance values for each domain. Although standard deviation values seem to be very similar for all domains and do not have great degree of difference, they still provide insight about the uniformity of results obtained for each domain. Referring to Table 5.5 it can be noticed that the lowest standard deviations and ranges were for natural environment and political environment domains, indicating more agreement for both domains and possibly more consistent

2 Mean values are calculated from ranks given to each domain. These differ from mean values presented in table 6.2 which was calculated from the corresponding values as shown earlier. Yet, they both give the same sort of information but in a reverse way. As an example, the mean value for health given in table 6.2 is equal to 7.45, while in table 6.3 it shows the value of 3.55. The high mean from the first table indicates high value, while the low mean from the second table refers to advanced rank, both of which denote high degree of importance for the domain.

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spread. On the contrary, employment and income as well as access to transportation were, respectively, the domains of the highest values of variance and standard deviation and accordingly attracted less agreement in ranking. Regarding housing, it can be noticed that it is among the domains which have the lowest standard deviation and variance, and a more consistent spread in comparison with other domains. Domains with larger variances are believed to represent a wide disparity in people’s opinions regarding the significance and degree of influence these domains have on people’s QOL, while domains with lower variances are believed to signify narrower disparity in thoughts.

Table 5.5: Mean, standard deviation and variance values of domains

Domain Mean Standard

Deviation Variance

Access to Transportation 6.69 2.496 6.228

Culture & Recreation 6.95 2.164 4.684

Education 4.69 2.261 5.114

Employment & Income 3.88 2.518 6.338

Family & Social Life 4.32 2.382 5.672

Health 3.55 2.269 5.148

Housing 3.89 2.233 4.987

Natural Environment 7.39 2.120 4.493

Political Environment 8.74 2.132 4.545

Security & Safety 4.13 2.416 5.846

Figure 5.4 presents box plots for the 10 domains that were examined. Values shown in these diagrams represent the original ranks of the domains where 1 denotes being ranked in the first place, i.e. most important and 10 denotes being ranked in the last place, i.e. least important. The use of box plots provided better understanding of the level of agreement associated with each domain, and made explicit the actual position that each one had attained. It can be seen that housing is among the domains that showed a reasonable level of uniformity in terms of inter quartile range (3). Domains of access to transportation, employment and income, as well as security and safety seemed to be more varied with a wider range of results, which indicates the variations in people’s perceptions and evaluation of these aspects.

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The domains’ ranking was also analysed in relation to assessment of QOL to discover the connections, if any, between the ranks people awarded for each domain and the values given to QOL. Spearman’s Correlation (2-tailed) test was applied to inspect any sort of correlation between domain ranks and QOL³. Table 5.6 presents results obtained.

Table 5.6: Spearman’s Rho results of testing correlations between QOL scores and domains’

ranking

Domain

Spearman’s correlation coefficient (Rs)

Type of correlation

Significant level (Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)

Access to Transportation 0.208 positive 0.000

Culture & Recreation -0.400 - 0.276

Education -0.108 negative 0.004

Employment & Income 0.104 positive 0.005

Family & Social Life -0.132 negative 0.000

Health -0.154 negative 0.000

Housing 0.123 positive 0.001

Natural Environment -0.047 - 0.207

Political Environment -0.004 - 0.922

Security & Safety -0.026 - 0.490

3 Spearman’s Correlation Test was applied because both variables, i.e. QOL and domains’ ranks, are ordinal and were found not to be normally distributed.

Figure 5.4.: QOL domains’ box plots

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Significant correlations have been found between QOL and the rankings of access to transportation, education, employment and income, family and social life, health and housing domains. Access to transportation reflects the strongest relationship. However, they all seem to have a weak linear relationship with QOL. Only three of the domains present a positive linear relationship with QOL. These are access to transportation, employment and income, as well as housing. On the other hand, the domains of education, health and family and social life present a negative relationship with QOL.

Taking into consideration that high values of domain ranking indicate being less influential or important, it can be said that, regarding the domains with positive correlation, the less important they are the higher QOL will be. Conversely, regarding the domains with negative relationship, the more important they are the higher QOL will be.

One possible interpretation is that people mostly consider the negative sides for the domains of transportation, housing, and employment and income. This includes, for instance, traffic congestion and poor public transportation in the case of transportation, low income and unemployment in the case of employment and income, and lack of affordable housing in the case of housing. In that sense they perceive these domains as negatively affecting their QOL and, therefore, being ranked highly means that these domains are strongly influencing QOL, but in a negative manner. An opposite observation can be made in the case of education, health and family and social life, where people usually look at the positive aspects of these domains, which accordingly are ranked highly meaning that they positively improve QOL. No correlation was found between QOL and the rankings of culture and recreation, natural environment, political environment, or security and safety domains.

Box plots, indicating the relationship between each domain rank and QOL, were used for further investigation. Two apparent relationships were figured out; the first with transportation and the second with housing. As can be seen from Figure 5.5 there seemed to be a kind of inverse relationship between access to transportation and QOL where higher ranks for access to transportation are associated with lower values of QOL. This reflects a negative influence of transportation on QOL where poor

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transportation conditions negatively influence QOL. Similarly, housing appears to have an inverse relationship with QOL as illustrated in Figure 5.6, where lower values of QOL can be seen to be associated with higher ranks for housing, expressing the same sort of relationship as the case with transportation.

Accordingly, two conclusions can be drawn. The first is that people tend in many cases to identify the main negative effects as significant aspects in their cities. The second conclusion is that housing and access to transportation are the most highly expressed or associated aspects of QOL and the ones that mostly reflect the general pattern of satisfaction with life quality. This in fact matches with the comments made by the majority of interviewed experts who emphasised the influences of transportation and housing in particular on the urban life of Amman.