Quality of Life within your Place

July 29, 2014

The Greater Louisville Project is built on a foundation of three Deep Drivers: Education, 21st Century Jobs, and Quality of Place. We have reported widely on the first two, but Quality of Place has proven a more elusive concept.

In order to report a full picture of what life is like in Louisville, it is important we present how life is for all residents of Louisville. Thus, we are in the beginning stages of developing measures for what we mean by “Quality of Place.” The academic literature distinguishes between “Quality of Life” and “Quality of Place.”

While there is considerable overlap between the concepts, Quality of Place generally refers to the built and physical environment and is often used in the context of economic development (e.g., cultural events and housing availability, which might attract companies and highly trained workers to town).

Quality of Life, on the other hand, refers more often to the wellbeing of individuals and to what extent they are financially secure (e.g., poverty levels, housing affordability, food security). Naturally, our other Deep Drivers—21st Century Jobs and Education—have connection and influence in both Quality of Life and Quality of Place.

In reporting on the other Deep Drivers, we get a good snapshot of the economy of Louisville, but we do not get a full picture of how well our residents are faring within employment and educational opportunities. If we do not report on, for example, the percentage of children living in poverty or the percentage of our full-time workers who are making sub-poverty wages, we ignore much of the story. Thus, in the coming months, we will be presenting data and discussion on these areas and present a view of “Quality of Life” in Louisville.

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.