Stability and Change of Regional Quality of life in Switzerland, 1978–1996

Abstract

Data from surveys on local quality of life (QOL) in Switzerland amongthree age cohorts of a combined 87 000 recruits doing their basicmilitary training in 1978, 1987 and 1996 are used in this study in orderto answer the following questions: How stable was the QOLprofile of the whole country since 1978, and how much QOLprofiles changed since then at the four disaggregationlevels of the 26 cantons, 106 regions, 169 urban communities and 91neighborhoods or suburbs of the 7 largest urban agglomerations ofSwitzerland? At the first three disaggregation levels, most of theone-item measures used seem to be rather valid, i.e., they tended infact to generate stable as well as plausible results in unchangingsituations, or to react sensitively to “objectively” changingconditions of life. Where in public discourse QOL attributes arediffuse, i.e. where they are only loosely coupled to acertain village, town, region etc., or where the QOL profiles of smallerterritories are only based on answers of a few respondents, the strongerimpact that unknown measurement errors have under these conditions makesinterpreting the results of some single variables moredifficult. Especially at the level of cantons and regions, however, QOLprofiles defined by spatially well-focused sets of subjectiveindicators are easily interpretable and very stable. Through all threesurveys, they depict and preserve the distinctive characteristics of acanton or region remarkably well. In general, interpreting these surveyresults from the perspective of discursive social psychology proves tobe advantageous.