Meta-Analysis of Methods and Findings of Urban Quality of Life in Iran

Introduction There is no agreement on what city and urban lifestyle are. It is not just about minimum factors that each city must have, but also about social interactions, social needs and individual perceptions which are dependent on cultural characteristics and geographical details. Generally speaking, cities have complex systems of transportation, sanitation, utilities, land usage, social connections and economic actions. These systems are always in the process of changing and developing. So, development of cities leads to new lifestyles and create what we may call urban life. Development of urban life causes concentration of equipments and resources in cities. Also, it is clear that a mere focus on quantitative facts of urban development is not enough to get to the efficient way of life. Hence researchers and managers have decided to pay more attention to factors which are more related to quality of urban life. In other words, after an initial attention to quantitative development of cities, the concept of quality of life is now getting attention in terms of qualitative factors. Due to this shift, a great deal of scientific and practical studies have been conducted and many new things have been revealed. Medical, sociological, psychological, environmental and economic points of views led to create new indexes and multidimensional frameworks. More than that, each city arrives at special findings which are linked to its local specifications. Because of diversity of results in different cases and cities, reaching to a shared and unique conclusion for urban quality of life is not easy. So the purpose of this study is to centralize and summarize the results of various studies on this topic in Iran. Meta-analysis is a research method for arriving at a specific knowledge from different studies. This research method was introduced in the late 1970s and soon became famous because of its abilities to get clear conclusions. Material & Methods This paper has analyzed Iranian scientific studies on quality of life, which were published until 2012. Meta-analysis is a tool for integrating scattered results and achieving to a new understanding in order to develop boundaries of knowledge. Identifying patterns among study results, contrasting and combining different studies, identifying a common measure of size effects, overcoming bias and doing systematic reviews are different benefits and applications of this method. Some steps are taken in order to get a reliable meta