What is the North Texas Quality of Life Initiative?
The North Texas Quality of Life Initiative is a multidimensional framework designed to deliver data and information critical to North Texas’ future growth. Informed by robust data collection and complex analytics, the Initiative will position North Texas as the destination for forward-thinking corporations while ensuring that all in the region realize an unparalleled quality of life.
A Platform Built for Growth
The North Texas Quality of Life Initiative is more than a survey. It’s a platform designed to make relevant data available to residents, civic leaders, scholars, and policy-makers. The platform is designed to be expanded by adding modules and survey products.
Survey Modules
The versatility of the survey platform allows us to add additional survey modules customized to specific geographic or demographic segments. This means that relevant questions can be deployed to meet specific economic, policy, or social information needs.
Expanded Survey Footprint
In addition to the annual survey, the North Texas Quality of Life infrastructure can be used to produce regular, shorter surveys. Surveys can be released monthly or quarterly to get near-real-time feedback on issues of local, regional, and national policy importance. These may include reactions to public data events, such as the release of census or labor reports. Surveys could assess attitudes toward current policy issues before local or regional government agen- cies. Moreover, public reaction to pressing social issues like homelessness and public safety may help shape local policy. The platform would also facilitate tracking these issues over time should there be an interest.
Data Analysis and Access
After completing each survey wave, we will quickly release findings to the survey sponsors and on the survey website. Top-line Findings, the first to be released, detail findings for North Texas. These findings provide a snapshot of the region; it is these findings against which we compare the nuanced differences. Detailed Findings, which take longer to produce, explore the subtle differences across North Texas’ diverse population. In this diversity we often find diverging opinions rooted in the deeply personal experiences that have led people to our community. Users can access the survey and contextual data in three main ways.
Dashboards
The UT Dallas Institute for Urban Policy Research will compile survey results into web-based dashboards for quick visualization by the general public. Working with faculty and students from our Social Data Analytics and other programs, the Institute has developed tools to present complex data clearly and easily understood.
These dashboards will allow novice users to access aggregate survey data and produce their own results. Users can see how that data varies by geography or demographic characteristics for any of the main variables of interest.
The Annual Quality of Life Report
The project team, working with graduate and undergraduate students, will produce an in-depth annual report detailing the quality of life in North Texas. In future years, the report will include analyses of change over time. This report will form the basis for annual communication campaigns.
Survey results will also be promptly publicized in local print and electronic media. We expect to release data beyond traditional media outlets and will work with social media and other creators to ensure that our information is widely available on existing and emerging media platforms.
Research Data Access
Individual-level survey data will be archived after three months on the UT Dallas website and after six months with a major research repository.
Survey data generated by question modules proposed by interested partners, as described above, will be released on the website after four months. This will give these partners, including students and faculty, time to conduct analyses and submit results for publication in refereed journals and presentations at scholarly conferences.
Getting to the Heart of the Issues
Studying Perception vs. Reality
This initiative aims to identify where, with whom, and on what issues differences exist between perception and reality for North Texas’s quality of life. Identifying and quantifying this disparity between perception and reality will help policymakers, organizations, and others better target where to invest resources to improve the quality of life for North Texans measurably. Our research will layer public perceptions against a known fact base to better understand what drives perception and what perception drives.
Explore Data Across
5
Survey Areas
4
Counties
206
ZIP Codes
