Citizen Preferences for Housing as Community Social Indicators

Abstract

The emerging demand for policy-relevant social information represents an exciting multidisciplinary challenge to develop a system of empirically derived social indicators. A review of the social indicators literature suggests that while much of the research has been directed at deriving aggregate, objective measures, there is a need for studies that focus on both objective and subjective measures at the community level. Three community field studies are presented that operationalize the social indicator dimension of housing quality through an empirical analysis of the home-buying process. The results were analyzed by principal-component analysis and chi-square tests. The findings indicate that significant differences exist between husbands and wives on a number of perceived housing quality attributes within each sample. Comparisons across samples show that measures of salience also differ on factors such as lot size, distance to churches, similarity of neighbors, and appearance and value of nearby homes. Information on perceived housing quality and other social indicators dimensions at the local level creates an opportunity for both private and public decision makers to better respond to social change.