Residential Satisfaction and Quality of Life

Abstract

The chapter begins by making a conceptual reflection of the relation between, terms such as wellbeing and the quality of life, based on a contextualization of the residential satisfaction. Thereafter, a revision is carried out on the pioneer research in residential satisfaction. Concretely, the chapter shows how these studies find out evaluation criteria that will allow to understand the reason why residents are satisfied with their houses even though the home assessment is not the most appropriated one.

Subsequently, the following domains of the residential environment are explinated: house, neighborhood and neighbors as well as their function as predictive variables to explain residential satisfaction. Closely linked to these domains, the residential satisfaction models that consider the same as a variable criteria of wellbeing or as a predictive variable of certain behavior are presented. Additionally it is explained a model that integrated both approaches. Once the form of understanding residential satisfaction is presented, the indexes of residential quality and their transformation to predictors of this variable will be analyzed. Furthermore, a classification of these will be explained in two dimensions: subjective vs objective and physical vs social. Finally, it is highlighted the importance of attachment to the place and its close relation with the residential satisfaction, specially focused on the neighborhood.