الفهرس 
QUALITY OF LIFE AND THE RESIDENTIAL ENVIRONMENTOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Quality of life assessment is used to measure people’s level of satisfaction with their lives, and it is performed through assessing many indicators. “Residential Environment” is one of the main indicators that constitute Quality of Life (QOL). The majority of previous research measuring the residential satisfaction focused on the three main domains of the Residential Environment, namely; Housing Unit, Neighbourhood and Social Environment. Each of these three domains is further divided into attributes; these attributes are the basis of the assessment process.
Previous research conducted to study the domain of residential environment in low income neighborhoods used survey questionnaires with Likert scale as an assessment method. In most of these studies, the attributes chosen for measurement were selected by the researchers themselves without the residents’ participation. The questionnaires used did not allow the residents to justify their answers. When it comes to Egypt, the research in both quality of life and low income neighborhoods is scarce.
That is why this research aims to fill the gap, through revisiting these three domains in the specific context of an Egyptian low income neighbourhood. This was done by extracting the attributes that constitute each domain from the residents’ point of view in order to allow them to voice their needs. Accordingly, ethnography was considered an appropriate approach that reaches residents input at grass-root level and hence was chosen to conduct the study with the residents of a governmental low income neighbourhood in New Cairo, Egypt. Marginal participant observations over a ten months span along with semi structured interviews were used for data collection.
The results were novel and promising. A large number of attributes was extracted, divided in two categories, existing attributes and emerging attributes. The former allowed for an extended understanding of the existing attributes in previous body of research and the latter defined and categorised newly emerging attributes that did not exist in the previous studies. Furthermore, emerging attributes addressing psychological qualities were identified, where residents expressed a dichotomy of feelings emanating from living in a low income neighbourhood; a sense of superiority versus a sense of inferiority.
In addition, the results seemed to indicate that the social environment is of great importance to the residents’ satisfaction although it was not always assessed in previous research. Finally, unlike the previous body of research, the region domain was found to play a role in residential satisfaction along with the usually influential studied three existing domains.
At its end, the research presented a full set of attributes that combine the attributes found in previous literature and the novel results extracted from the study, hence providing future researchers with an assessment tool that might be representative of the needs and opinions of the residents of low income neighborhoods, especially in contexts similar to the studied area.