Social participation potential index

Update March 15, 2018: The final report submitted to the FRQSC is publicly available. You can download the full report or a summary below:

The general objective of this project was thus to better understand the social participation of aging Quebecers and to develop a social participation potential index (IPPS), a decision support tool that represents, in the form of an interactive atlas, the potential for social participation of the environments of aging Quebecers at the level of neighbourhoods, boroughs, municipalities and administrative regions.

The social participation potential index was calculated systematically for the administrative entities which are:

The methodology used is briefly described below:

  1. Preferred methodological approach : The IPPS is based on quantitative and spatial analyzes that have made it possible to describe social participation, to verify its associations with environmental and individual characteristics, and to map the potential for social participation of neighborhoods, boroughs, municipalities and administrative regions of Quebec .
  2. Data collection methods : Individual data, including frequency of participation in social activities, are taken from theCanadian Community Health Survey – Healthy Aging (CCHS-HA), produced by Statistics Canada. The environmental data comes from varied and reliable databases, supplemented by surveys of the boroughs, municipalities and transportation organizations of Quebec.
  3. Corpus or sample : The ESCC-VS is a representative sample of the Quebec population aged between 45 and 64 (n=2,464) or 65 and over (n=2,737). The environmental databases cover all of Quebec, except indigenous reserves and northern municipalities. Good response rates were obtained from the surveys (n = 579 districts/municipalities; 50.9 % and n = 69 transport organizations; 39.4 % completed by the Ministry of Transport, Sustainable Mobility and Electrification of transport and websites).
  4. Analysis strategies and techniques : The matching of environmental data to individual data made it possible to carry out regression models that identified the environmental characteristics most associated with the social participation of seniors. Finally, the potential for social participation was calculated at the level of neighbourhoods, boroughs, municipalities and administrative regions of Quebec using principal component analyses. For interactive viewing and comparison, the potential score has been mapped and posted on this website.