Quality of Life (QOL) Assessment: a Case Study of Beijing

Quality of life (QOL) is not only a comprehensive description of people's living standards in a society, but also an important indicator of development degree of a society as a whole. This study takes Beijing as a case study from the perspective of individuals’ living, and explores the relationships between social indicators and QOL. Satisfaction degree is used as a measure of QOL, and was modified by a framework consisting of four dimensions (i.e., quality of physical environment, quality of social environment, quality of economic environment, and quality of transportation) based on peoples’ subjective judgment and the corresponding objective indicator value. After conducting a hierarchical structure analysis, the result shows that satisfaction degree of social environment is the most significant contributing dimension to QOL, and, income level is the key influential factor for QOL among all the assessment indicators.