Public Opinion Research

III.     The Ideal Community

B. Stated versus Derived Importance

While examining what urban Canadians state as their priorities is key to understanding what is perceived to be working and what is not, another approach is to use these same responses and determine what is most strongly linked to overall perceptions of the quality of life of the communities in which Canadians live. This approach correlates the performance scores with overall perceptions of the quality of community life in order to identify the attributes that most strongly affect satisfaction. That is, which attributes are statistically the most important in determining how urban Canadians overall feel about the community in which they live.

When this multivariate analysis is undertaken, as Figure 5 shows, there is a clear hierarchy of attributes that drive perceptions of quality of life. When analyzing derived importance, three of the four most important are among those that were identified as the most important for a desirable community. These are: a thriving business community, green spaces and parks, and quality schools, colleges and universities. The only new attribute is highly educated people. At the same time, some attributes of importance in identifying a desirable community are not as important when linked to overall perceptions of the quality of community life. In particular, good public transit and efficient composting and recycling programs are not strongly linked to overall satisfaction. Affordable housing also becomes less of a priority when the attributes are correlated with overall satisfaction. This suggests that, while these factors are thought to be desirable, their link to overall satisfaction with the community is (relatively) limited. Essentially, these attributes are more important on an intellectual level than on a personal level.

By contrast, three attributes in particular are more highly prioritized when they are linked with overall quality of life. These include: a thriving business community (up from eighth place to first), highly educated people (up from tenth place to third) and good sports and recreational facilities (up from ninth place to fifth).

Figure 5

Desired Community Features: Derived Importance

Variations by Community Size

When community size is considered, there are some variations in terms of priorities. For the smallest communities, green spaces and highly educated people drop out of the top four and are replaced by an active arts and cultural community and efficient composting and recycling. Possibly in smaller towns, community based arts activities have an importance that they do not in larger communities.

For all other sizes of community, while there is some variation, the basic pattern at the national level holds locally.

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