Quality of Life in the U.S. States: 1970 and 2000

Social scientists are showing renewed interest in quality of life (QOL) issues at a variety of geographic scales. David Smith’s (1973) study of social well-being across the continental U.S. states is now recognized as being a landmark among the earlier contributions. Using an array of 47 variables spread across six major categories (income, housing, health, education, social disorganization, alienation and participation), Smith attempted to capture the wide diversity of factors that comprise QOL. In this paper, we update Smith’s data set to the present and fully replicate his analysis. We begin by pursuing his initial line of inquiry, computing standard scores for the same six QOL categories and then rank-ordering the states according to both their category-specific and their overall performances. Then we follow Smith’s second line of inquiry, applying well-known multivariate techniques in order to allocate the states to a small number of relatively homogeneous groups. A remarkable degree of QOL stability—both in the state rankings and in the state groupings—is our main finding, although there are cases of exceptional change. The correlation coefficient between state-level QOL in 1970 and state-level QOL in 2000 is remarkably high (r = 0.872), although the degree of stability is much higher in some QOL categories (income and housing) than in others (social disorganization, alienation and participation). Based on the overall standard scores—capturing QOL performance across all 47 variables—the biggest state losers (e.g., Arizona and California) were generally found in the nation’s Southwest and Midwest, and the biggest state winners (e.g., North Carolina and Vermont) were generally found in the nation’s Northeast and South.