In this second memorandum, in your capacity as management analyst you have been asked to draft a memo on preliminary quality-of-life measures for any Western New York city, village, or town of your choice. Your employer wants you to develop a set of “quality of life” indicators that in the future could be used as benchmarks for future improvements in local governance.

It can be relatively easy to find countless statistics and data that might serve as meaningful indicators of community-level quality of life. For this assignment, however, you are not actually going to search for any data. Instead, you will concentrate on the "thinking" part of developing measures, which is far more critical to the ultimate success of any research endeavor. In particular, what you will do here is to conceptualize quality of life and then think of indicators that you could ideally use to measure quality of life as you have conceptualized it.

Your assignment has three parts. First, specify and define the various dimensions of “quality of life” you wish to measure and provide a title and a one-sentence (or less) working definition for each of these dimensions. Select any dimensions of quality of life you wish, but be sure to have at least 5--and no more than 10--distinct dimensions. Second, provide some sample indicators you might use in operationalizing each of your dimensions of quality of life. For each of these indicators, specify the range of values (attributes) you would create for each and note the indicator’s level of measurement (nominal, ordinal, interval or ratio). Be specific and comprehensive. Be certain to list at least two indicators for each of the dimensions you describe in the first part of the memo. These two parts of the assignment should be submitted in an acceptable memorandum format and should be approximately 300 words and between 1-1/2 and 2 pages, maximum. Third, make a 3-5 minute presentation (in groups of 2-3 people, to be assigned during 9/21 class session) of your work to class. Each group member will turn in a separate memo. This assignment is due 9/28 at the beginning of class.

Here's an example of how to do both parts for a "Recreation" dimension of community quality of life:

Dimension #1: Recreation - The extent to which there is ample quantity, quality, and variety in the recreational opportunities available in the community.

• Indicators of Recreation:
  • Number of public parks - Ratio-level measure.
  • Number of public "recreational events" per year - Ratio-level measure.
  • Satisfaction with quality of park system - Ordinal-level measure based on responses to citizen satisfaction survey. Values:
    • Very low
    • Low
    • Neither low nor high
    • High
    • Very high
  • Number of Different Sports Played in Organized Leagues in the Community - Ratio-level measure.

If you're having trouble getting started thinking of the indicators you might use to measure your dimensions of quality of life, here is a long, yet by no means exhaustive, list of potential community-level quality-of-life measures: