How in the world can anyone possibly measure quality of life? After all, it’s such a subjective, personal evaluation. More importantly, most people tend to like where they live, so why even bother?

The answer to the latter question is that quality of life ratings are not designed for the people who already live in a particular town; they are for people who are considering a move to that town. It’s a way for them to benchmark a future location by comparing it to other places they have lived.

Before you can measure something, though, you have to agree on a definition of what it is. So, what exactly is quality of life?

No, what quality of Life is really all about access to the American Dream, about being able to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle that enables families to be able to afford to buy a home, or to at least rent a decent apartment; to enjoy a reasonable standard of living; to send their children to decent public schools; to have access to quality health care at a reasonable price; to live their lives reasonably free from crime; to have access to employment opportunities for the non-military spouse; to have access to reasonably-priced child care services; to not have to spend their days caught up in traffic snarls; to have reasonable access to commercial air services so that family members can visit each other occasionally; and to have access to a reasonable variety of continuing education opportunities to improve one’s job skills and future promotion and employment.

The purpose of Expansion Management’s 2006 Military Communities of Excellence Quality of Life study is to provide a means to both measure and compare the relative “quality of life” of the various civilian communities throughout the United States in which the Department of Defense (DOD) has military installations. This study is a variation of Expansion Management Magazine’s annual Quality of Life Quotient TM.

Why focus on the civilian communities? We do it because roughly two-thirds of all military personnel and their families live off-post in the local civilian community. While traditional military quality of life studies and surveys have tended to focus on life on the installation, that’s not where most of service members and their families live.

HOW WE CHOSE THE BASES AND CIVILIAN COMMUNITIES

Military installations in the United States are really communities within a larger civilian community. This is particularly true for military families, who frequently live off-post, shop off-post and, in the case of the spouse, work off-post.

All active duty military installations with a minimum of 500 people (military and civilian combined) assigned were selected. A total of 219 installations met this criteria: 71 Army, 59 Navy, 70 Air Force, 18 Marine Corps, and the Pentagon reservation.

All Reserve and National Guard Installations with a minimum of 250 people (military and civilian combined) were selected. A total of 330 National Guard installations and 112 Reserve Installations met this criteria.

Our source for information about these military installations, as well as their population, was the DOD Base Structure Report, FY 2005 Baseline, Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Installations & Environment).

Of the 219 U.S.-based military installations with at least 500 people, all but 27 are physically located within the confines of one of the 362 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA), as defined by the Office of Management and Budget in June 2003. A total of 99 MSAs are home to one or more active duty military installations.

Demographic and economic data for the remaining 27 military communities are based on the county in which the installation is located. The county of location was based upon the main zip code for the installation.

Of the 112 Reserve installations, all but one (Camp McCoy, Wis.) were located in one of 59 MSAs. The 330 National Guard installations were located in 186 MSAs and 27 non-MSA counties.

MAJOR QUALITY OF LIFE CATEGORIES

In order to get a feel for the relative quality of life in these various civilian communities that are home to one or more active military installations, we looked at 12 broad categories that, when combined, give one a pretty good feel for the relative quality of life from a middle-class perspective.

Public Education. Being able to send one’s children to good (and safe) schools is one of the main ingredients to quality of life. Private schools tend to flourish in areas with poor public schools because people will sacrifice a lot for their children’s future. However, being able to send their kids to excellent local public schools — rather than having to bear the added expense of a private education — means that those families will be able to devote that portion of their income to things that will enhance their overall sense of quality of life.

Since service members and their families generally live throughout a metro area, the concept of this category is to capture an overall evaluation of the quality of the public schools throughout the metro, rather than just relying on the reputation of the metro’s namesake school district (which usually is not very good).

Click here to read the companion article Finding the Best School for Your Child

Affordable Housing. Along with good schools and safe streets, affordable housing is the most important ingredient to quality of life. It’s a natural desire among people to want to live in a nice home. Unfortunately, housing costs vary dramatically from city to city, and in some metros, home ownership is virtually impossible for many middle class families.

The concept in this category is to capture a mix of rental rates and average home prices, as well as additional allowances (i.e., BAH) that the DOD must pay service members in order to offset higher housing expenses in a particular locale.

Click here to read the companion article Finding Affordable Housing — Challenges and Solutions

Community Standard of Living. Many metros enjoy a low cost of living mainly because nobody makes any money and the poverty rate is sky high. In other metros, the average person makes a great salary but can’t afford much more than a studio apartment and one night a month at McDonalds. Clearly, there has to be a happy median.

The idea here is to get a good feel for the overall standard of living enjoyed by residents of a metro area. In order to do this, we look at a broad range of factors such as the median family income, per capita income and per capita disposable income, as well as comparing the relative cost of living, state and local tax burden, and unemployment rates.

Click here to read the companion article Military Family Raises Its Own Standard of Living Over 30 Years

Crime & Safety. It goes without saying that a feeling of personal safety is absolutely critical to a family’s quality of life. In this category, we used data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation annual crime statistics, focusing on nine different categories of crime in order to get a broad feel for the overall crime situation.

Click here to read the companion article A Safe, Secure Environment Is Crucial to Military Families’ Quality of Life

Healthcare Costs. With the end of the Cold War, many military hospitals have been downgraded to clinics, operating mainly during normal duty hours, or shut down completely. Military family members, whether they lived on-base or off-base, used to be able to take advantage of these convenient — and inexpensive — services.

These cutbacks have caused military families to look, often exclusively, to the local civilian community for their health care services. This is not an issue of quality, since Americans still enjoy the best health care system in the world. The issue here is cost.

The concept in this category is to get a mix of cost-related data, such as hospital costs, health insurance costs and doctor visit costs, as well as access issue such as Medicare and Tricare acceptance by local civilian doctors.

Click here to read the companion article Access to TRICARE Helps Families at a Time of Great Need

Spouse Employment Opportunities. For whatever reason, whether it’s because both spouses are skilled professionals or they both need to work just to make ends meet, the two-income family is the norm in our country. Personnel specialists have been telling us for years that spouse employment opportunities are an important factor when it comes to an employee’s final decision on whether or not to move to a new location.

For military spouses, the traditional gauge of employment opportunity has been one form or another of government employment, usually on the local military base, and these jobs are relatively hard to find. This has led them to feel the job market is tight when, in fact, the vast majority of the jobs are off base in the local civilian economy.

To measure the relative flexibility of the local job market, we use unemployment statistics — the average rate for the past 12 months, as well as the January rates for the past three years (2006, 2005 and 2004) — from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Click here to read the companion article Military Spouses Bring Valuable Characteristics When Job Hunting

Child Care Cost & Quality. Ample options for affordable and reliable child care are no longer a luxury in our society; they are a necessity. This is especially true for military families who face a variety of unique challenges that can involve dual-military parents, living far from extended family, short notice travel orders and non-traditional work schedules.

Perhaps more than ever before, it is imperative that military families, whether living on-post or off, have access to a variety of quality and affordable child care options.

The concept here is to establish a mix of cost and quality criteria, and includes comparative cost data comes from USA Today’s 2005 Preschool Costs study, and child-to-staff ratio maximums for each state.

Click here to read the companion article Quality Daycare Facilities Difficult to Find in Civilian Community

Continuing Education Opportunities. This is an important factor for employer and employee alike. Whether it’s for degree-completion, a change of career field, to improve one’s job skills, or simply for the sheer joy of learning something new, adult education is one of the fastest growing sectors in American life.

While colleges and universities are more prominent, local community colleges play a key role with traditional “adult education” offerings. More importantly, for service members who enter the military straight out of high school, community colleges offer the most flexible and cost-effective route to finish up the first two years toward a college degree.

Having a mix of post-secondary educational institutions is a major plus for a community, particularly if they are able to service needs ranging from basic community college courses all the way to Ph.D. degrees in scientific and technical disciplines.

Click here to read the companion article Continuing Education Resources Key to Personal Growth

Recreation & Leisure. Trying to compare and rank recreation and leisure opportunities among communities throughout the country is an exercise in subjectivity, at best. What is fun and exciting – or even interesting – for one person, is often looked upon by another person as being dull and boring. After all, living on the ocean is probably not all that exciting for someone who doesn’t swim and who hates the feel of sand in their waste band.

For this category, we looked at the presence of professional sports teams in the following leagues: Major League Baseball, National Football League, National Basketball Association, Women’s National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, and NASCAR. We also looked at state park acreage and visitors, as well as overall leisure and recreation ratings from two outside sources: “Cities Ranked & Rated” by Bert Sperling and Peter Sander (both the leisure category and the arts & culture category), and “Places Rated Almanac” by David Savegeau (recreation category only).

The last two sources offer an overall ranking of leisure activities based upon a variety of data. To drive home the point about subjectivity, these two books often rated the same metropolitan area dramatically different in the same category. To come up with a “final” rank, we averaged the results from the two sources for each metro.

Click here to read the companion article Recreational Opportunities Round Out a Community

Commuting & Traffic. When most people think of being stuck in traffic, they think of the bumper-to-bumper traffic common during rush hour in a big city. However, long commutes are also a way of life for people who live out in the “middle of nowhere” and must routinely commute great distances to work, shopping and other daily activities. The only real difference between the two is the speed of your car — either way, you’re stuck in a car.

In this category, we chose two measurements: the average commute to work time and the percentage of adults who work outside of the county in which they live.

Click here to read the companion article Smooth Traffic Flow Is Crucial to Military Quality of Life

Commercial Air Service. Convenient access to commercial air service has become an important quality of life factor for most Americans. Low prices for air travel enable families to substitute a long automobile trip with a quick flight home to visit the relatives. In general, the greater the number of flights and carriers serving an airport, the lower the price for air fares.

Click here to read the companion article Convenient Airport Access Helps Family Cope with Long Deployment

State Legislative Issues. In this study, we looked at two of the issues impacting military families that could be resolved by state legislative action: in-state college tuition for dependents of military service members, and unemployment insurance for military spouses who are forced to leave their employment in order to accompany their service member spouse upon change of duty station.

Click here to read the companion article State Governments Work to Improve Life for Military Families

WHAT THE FINAL NUMBERS MEAN

All rankings are a reflection of how a particular metro area compares to the 362 MSAs and 55 counties in the study. The final Metro Percentile Rank for each of the 12 major categories, as well as the Overall Metro Percentile Rank, is expressed as a percentile, with 99 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. These are the most important numbers for the purpose of this study.

WAYS TO USE THIS INFORMATION

The best use of this information is as a tool to help identify specific strengths and weaknesses in various civilian communities throughout the U.S.

An example of how this might be done would be to consider any results in the upper third (percentile 67 to 99) as a strength; anything in the bottom third (percentile 1 to 33) as a weakness; and any ranking in the middle (percentile 34 to 66) as being average or satisfactory.

Similarly, if you want to sharpen the distinction between communities, you could break the results into quintiles, with the upper 20 percent rating an A, the next 20 percent a B … and so on for C, D and F.

So, while quality of life is, in many ways, a subjective and highly personal appraisal, it is still possible to measure many of the most important factors that go into creating quality of life. Depending upon where you and your family are in life’s journey, some of these categories are more important than others.

For example, schools are very important if you have kids. If your children are grown, or you don’t have any children, then having good schools is probably not very important to you (except to the extent that good schools increase the property value of your home).

In that vein, focus on those quality of life factors that are important to your family, and just take note of the ones that aren’t so important to you.

OTHER ARTICLES APPEARING IN THE “2006 Military Communities of Excellence” MAGAZINE
Click here to read the companion article Instate Tuition Waivers Pay Dividends In Family Satisfaction

Click here to read the companion article Military OneSource Operates as a Clearinghouse of Information

Click here to read the companion article Reservists Feel Strain of Long-Term Deployments

Click here to read the companion article The Military Severely Injured Center Is Taking Care of Their Own

COLUMNS APPEARING IN THE “2006 Military Communities of Excellence” MAGAZINE
Click here to read the companion article EDITOR’S COMMENTARY: Quality of Life Is Part of Leading From the Front

Click here to read the companion article SPOUSE PERSPECTIVE: America Says Thank You to Our Military Service Members

Click here to read the companion article RETIREE PERSPECTIVE: Adjusting to Civilian Life Is Not Without its Challenges

Bill King is the chief editor of Expansion Management, a business-to-business magazine that focuses on helping corporate executives evaluate future locations. He is also a retired Army officer and can be reached at BillKing@Penton.com.