SPATIAL VARIATION OF QUALITY OF LIFE: A CASE STUDY OF EGOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA, EDO STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Quality of life (QoL) is becoming the subject of both rural and urban researches in African countries and Nigeria states. Such attention is due to an increasing awareness of the contribution of QoL studies in identifying problem areas and in monitoring urban planning policies. Also, most QoL studies are carried in the international and national levels and such studies covers the variability within small scale areas like Local government areas in Nigeria. This research maps the QoL of Egor Local Government Area using subjective measures. Twelve indicators were used to map the QoL of Egor Local Government Area. These indicators were grouped into three different domains of life (social, economic and physical domains). Spatial autocorrelationcheck was performed on the indicators to determine the spatial prediction method that was used for each indicator. Out of the indicators, only two was spatially autocorrelated. The spatially autocorrelated indicators were interpolated using the Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW). The other indicators are interpolated using the voronoi polygons. The twelve prediction maps was used to create the overall QoL with the utilization of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis called weighted sum. The weights used for the combination of the various prediction maps were given by the respondents. The overall QoL map was cross-validated using leave-one-out (LOO) cross-validation method. The result shows that 67.6% of the geographic space of the study area is below average, 17.9% is extremely poor, and 14.5% is average. Above average and excellent was not on the generated QoL map. In general, the findings of this study indicate the presence of QoL variability at small scales. The findings and approaches of this study can be used in designing future QoL studies in the region.