The fabric of the Quality of Life index

The GCRO's Quality of Life index combines a range of variables measuring various aspects of both subjective and objective well-being. It is constructed from responses to 58 Quality of Life survey questions, grouped into 10 different dimensions - global life satisfaction; family; community; health; dwelling; infrastructure; connectivity; work; security; and socio-political attitudes. While the overall index scores provide us with a sense of quality of life across the Gauteng City-Region (GCR), looking at the individual dimension scores can provide greater insight into different aspects of well-being. Using a series of radial plots, this visualisation presents the scores for each dimension of the Quality of Life index for each survey iteration since 2011. We illustrate these scores for Gauteng as a whole, as well as each municipality, for 2011, 2013/14, 2015/16, and 2017/18. Points closer to the centre of each plot represent lower well-being, while those further from the centre indicate domains in which well-being is better.

The Quality of Life data visualisation shows that the dimensions of community and health have fluctuated over the four surveys and that the work and global life satisfaction dimensions are the lowest scoring categories of indicators across all municipalities. In comparison, the infrastructure and dwelling dimensions are the highest scoring in the Quality of Life index.

For comparative purposes, a similar data visualisation showing the marginalisation index can be viewed here.

This vignette on the QoL index provides some additional information on how the Quality of Life index is calculated. If you are interested in understanding which questions feed into the different dimensions of the QoL and marginalisation indices, this paper outlines the theoretical underpinnings, while these documents map out each variable and dimension for the QoL and marginalisation indices, and their scores over time.