Quality of Island Life Cooperative

Members of the Quality of Island Life Co-operative (QoIL Co-op) recognize that on Prince Edward Island, people enjoy a quality of life that is both special and vulnerable. The purpose of the Co-op is to engage other Islanders in conversations around what wellbeing and Quality of Life mean; to promote the development of indicators that describe Quality of Life as defined by Prince Edward Islanders; and to promote these indicators as tools that can help people to understand how our Island society is progressing, and to plan where we want to go in the future. The study described in this report is a contribution to the development of Community Accounts for Prince Edward Island — an open access, online tool that provides information to and about individual communities, to facilitate local decision-making. Community Accounts could be used to track changes in the factors that contribute to Quality of Life as experienced on Prince Edward Island, provided that the appropriate data are included in the system. Quality of Life factors may or may not be adequately described by existing statistics developed from census and other data. In this report we explore the meaning of “Quality of Life” as expressed by residents of Tyne Valley and surrounding villages in 2006; we document the extent to which valued aspects of the community are correlated with Quality of Life; and we identify whether changes noted in recent years could be threatening or enhancing Quality of Life.