Socio-Economic Factors Affecting the Quality of Life of Tehranian Citizens

Quality of life has always been a key concept and humans sought to find the factors and methods that would guide him towards a good life. According to a NUMBEO report, in 2015, regarding the quality of life index, Tehran rank was 106 compared to other cities from 113 countries. This rank indicates a low quality of life in Iran. Quality of life is a dynamic concept and changes over time. The evaluation of this concept illustrates the state of human development in a society. Therefore, a continuous examination of the quality of life is essential. In this study, we try to examine the effect of socioeconomic factors affecting the quality of life of citizens of Tehran. Therefore, variables such as social support, feeling of relative deprivation, social happiness and socioeconomic status were considered as independent variables.
The present study was of descriptive–casual type. The research method was survey. Statistical population included all the resident families in Tehran in 2015. The data were collected by questionnaires and interviews, the survey was carried out among 420 people in three regions of north, south and center of Tehran (140 samples per region). . To measure the quality of life, the Global Quality of Life Questionnaire was used. Data were analyzed by SPSS software. The tests used to analyze the findings included Pearson correlation test, regression test, path analysis and model review.
Findings: The age average of respondents was young. More than half of the respondents had a moderate quality of life. In the mental dimension of quality of life, one of the most important results was that more than half of the respondents needed medical treatment for their daily activities. In the objective dimension of quality of life, most respondents assessed the health of their surroundings low. Most of the respondents had low social support, a moderate feeling of relative deprivation, moderate social happiness, and moderate social economic status. Research findings suggest that social happiness, social support, feeling of relative deprivation and socio-economic status variables effect on more than half of the quality of life changes. Social happiness has the greatest impact on quality of life.
The social happiness variable is influenced by the feeling of relative deprivation and social support, and the social economic status variable is also influenced by the feeling of relative deprivation.
The variables affecting quality of life, respectively, with the highest impact, are: social happiness, relative deprivation, and socioeconomic status. Therefore, it can be said that the proper quality of life is created by the feeling of happiness, the lower feeling of relative deprivation, the higher socioeconomic status and the support that a person receives from his family, friends and acquaintances. Regarding the effectiveness of independent variables (social happiness, the feeling of relative deprivation, economic and social status and social support) in increasing the quality of life of citizens of Tehran, with high explanatory factors and the relationship of independent variables together, addressing all of them requires deep attention and review which should be at the top of social and economic programs of the community. Since Tehran as a metropolis has a large population, the findings of this research can be partially generalized to other metropolises of our country. Thus, the results of the research, which emphasize on two social and economic dimensions, will improve the conditions of the community and improve the quality of life of the people.