Quality of Life Satisfaction: A Comparative Survey Analysis of the Eastern Panhandle and Southern West Virginia Counties

The main objective of this paper is to analyze and report quality of life survey responses from a random sample of over 1028 individuals from 21 counties in West Virginia. The survey responses are drawn from a quality of life survey conducted in 2000. Perhaps the most interesting observation from the responses was not that differences exist among counties but that, in all counties, the level of satisfaction was remarkably high (over 50%). Only small fractions of individuals were explicitly dissatisfied, surprisingly in counties with the highest growth levels in per capita incomes