Introduction

Background

Identifying the particular characteristics of neighborhoods can be useful to health workers, government officials, educators, business leaders, community activists, not-for-profit service providers and law enforcement agencies when designing policies and providing services to communities.
An index can be used to illustrate the particular neighborhood qualities being investigated and examined. Since there are many indicators that can be used to gain a perspective on the condition of the area of interest, many studies have focused on finding just a few particular indicators that can reliably be used for neighborhood monitoring (e.g. Galster, Hayes and Johnson 2005). This is particularly useful because it reduces both the time and cost required to satisfy the intended objective by narrowing the regularly collected data down to a just few indicators, rather than having to compile and process huge amounts of data.

Research Problem

For this study, I sought to find an index for neighborhood stress in the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD). This was achieved by performing statistical analysis on a number of Dissemination Area level variables of the Canada Census Data for 2001. The selected variables reflect dependency, need, housing condition and economic status. The neighborhood boundaries were determined by the dissemination areas, as defined by Statistics Canada, and the social characteristics(variables) examined are those indicative of chronic distress in an area.