The evaluation of quality of life with special reference to accessibility

Research Project

Project/Area Number	07680167
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	Human geography
Research Institution	Ehime University
Principal Investigator	FUJIME Setsuo EHIME UNIVERSITY,FACULTY of LAW and LETTERS PROFESSOR, 法文学部, 教授 (80036384)
Project Period (FY)	1995 – 1996
Project Status	Completed (Fiscal Year 1996)
Budget Amount *help	¥2,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,300,000) Fiscal Year 1996: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000) Fiscal Year 1995: ¥1,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,600,000)
Keywords	quality of life / accessibility / residential preference / distance decay function
Research Abstract	Although accessibility to jobs, services and amenities is an important component of the quality of life, it was seldom used as an indicator in the early studies of the quality of life (QOL). It was Pred and Knox who first stressed the importance of physical accessibility to facilities in determining the quality of life. Since then there have been several studies which tried to include accessibility as an additional indicator of the quality of life. In view of geographical scales, most of those studies have been carried out in the community scale, and few studies have been carried out in the city scale. If we take the population's high mobility in recent years into consideration, however, we have to include physical accessibility in determining QOL in the city scale as well as in the community one. On the basis of the above cognition, we proposed a quality of life evaluation model with special reference to accessibility in which the facilities located in other neighboring municipalities w … More ere considered using a distance decay function in calculating the level of quality of life of a given municipality. We applied it to seventy municipalities in Ehime prefecture. We did two calculations of quality of life, one with and one without taking accessibility into account. We then examined the spatial correlation between them and people's residential preferences for seventy municipalities. The result of the analysis are summarized as follows : 1.When taking accessibility into account, we have rather different spatial patterns of quality of life from those where accessibility was not considered. In the former case, the evaluated quality of life values of municipalities near major cities like Matsuyama or Imabari are considerably improved by virtue of the high quality of life values of these cities. 2.The spatial correlations between the evaluated quality of life and the people's residential preference are considerably closer in the case where accessibility is considered compared to the case where accessibility is not considered. 3.We can conclude from the above results that we have to take the accessibility of a given municipality to its neighboring municipalities into account for the values of quality of life to be truly reflected in the calculation of the value of quality of life of the given municipality. Less