Quality of life in Jasper, Alberta

This paper describes and explains citizen beliefs and attitudes about the quality of life in Jasper, Alberta in the summer of 1997. We report on 447 survey respondents' satisfaction with a wide variety of aspects of their community and their lives, the best and worst things about living in Jasper, and the things they would change first to improve the quality of their lives. There was not much enthusiasm for use-fees or the value received from tax dollars. Fifteen new indices of satisfaction with fundamental aspects of people's lives were created. Happiness, life satisfaction and overall satisfaction with the quality of life were explained from a limited set of 14 variables, providing comparisons with results from seven other surveys taken over nearly 20 years. Finally, we used a simple linear model to account for 63% of the variance in life satisfaction scores, 44% of the variance in satisfaction with the quality of life scores and 37% of the variance in happiness scores.