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IS THERE A DIFFERENCE IN QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE TWO WARDS IN THE COLCHESTER DISTRICT OF NEWTOWN AND LEXDEN? Alex Pipkin Introduction to study: Colchester population is roughly around 140,000, it was a major roman town, which is one of its main attractions, and it is a garrison town also. Colchester developed as a market town and attracted many people from around the country, the railway and new road opening in 1844 helped Colchester develop further and by 1851 it had less than half the population it has today. Today its main attractions are its town and shops, and its university. Also the A12 runs right through the middle and thus it is a large commuting town aswell. The 2 wards I am studying come from the center of Colchester itself (fig 1). In this coursework I am going to study 2 wards in the Colchester district, these wards are Lexden and Newtown. I am going to collect data from both wards, data about: housing density and quality, services and road accesses, pollution and street conditions. With this data I am hoping to be able to judge the quality of life in both the wards and compare them and reasons for changes in the data and results that I obtain. I chose this study because it would be helpful and interesting to identify reasons for variations in quality of life between classes, and how and why location has an effect on this. Key Questions: · What are the differences in quality of life in certain areas in Newtown and Lexden? · Are these differences seen / expected for all urban and rural areas in Colchester? · Can any famous theories on city layouts be applied to Colchester and these wards? Fig 1. Map of the wards of Colchester. · The map above (fig 1) shows all of the wards in Colchester, Lexden is located on the map as ward 12; it is a large rural area in the center of Colchester’s map. Newtown on the other hand is a large urban area located 2 wards away from Lexden close to the border of the map. The maps below show the immediate areas of my chosen wards, details, reliefs, and local features can be seen on these maps. Fig 2. Map of Newtown 500m Map of Lexden Data collection: I collected data throughout both wards in my intended study area, the data I needed to collect had to be organized in a certain way, so that it could be analyzed effectively, and conclusions and theories made from the results. Due to this I decided to put my data collection methods into a single table, which data on car ownership, housing density and quality, services and road accesses, pollution and street conditions could be extracted. Also later I decided to extract registration numbers from the area, I think these are important factors in finding out if there’s is a difference in quality of life in Colchester, because these are basic things found throughout all of the wards in Colchester and thus should allow me to be able to make comparisons of my chosen two (Lexden and Newtown). The tables from which I collected the data shall be included in the back of my project, to prove that I collected the data individually. They shall be set out like this for house quality: Fig 3. None Little Some A lot Paint peeling 0 1 3 5 Brick deterioration 0 1 3 5 Broken roofs 0 1 3 5 Cracks in walls 0 1 3 5 Parking 0 1 3 5 Environmental quality: (again used with scoring method, for ranking) fig 4. Road: Building conditions Parking provisions Traffic density Pollution Fitzwalder Rd St clare Rd Beaver Rd Morant Rd Harsnett Rd Artillery St Victor Rd My data collection worked out fine, and I gained good enough results to analyze from and thus gained good enough validity from. However a bigger study over a longer period of time would of allowed me to increase on this and maybe find things I missed first time. The way a I set out my data collection worked well too, as I was able to collect data quickly and effectively without causing to much trouble to people living on the streets I was studying. As this was a small ethical problem I faced, as I doubt people would approve on me making assumptions about their quality of living. I was only given the basic wards to study however, and given my restrictive amount of resources and time, I chose to narrow my study down to direct streets in these wards, taking 3 streets from both wards, in which I can analyze the data from. The streets I will study will be random, thus hopefully giving me a more fair way of collecting data and giving me a wider range of results in the end, and hopefully giving me broader perspectives on the equality of quality of life in the two wards, and thus eventually putting me closer to proving my hypothesis. The streets and the data I collect from them in the areas stated above, I will eventually rank, using a scoring method and hopefully this should again allow me to order my results and rank the roads and the results from them to show if they scored good or badly. This in turn will allow me to compare the roads from the two wards using their scores and allow me to note if one ward did significantly better than the other. The data itself was collected around the 31st of march on a Sunday, there were reasons for doing this, such as firstly I knew there would be no traffic or anything like that which would disrupt my data collection, secondly all shops are shut so I knew everything would be calm and there would be minimum people out on the streets and cars and such would be parked as they normally would, this came in handy in Newtown as if it had been a Saturday for example a lot of the cars would have been moved but because I did research on this day not near to any immediate holiday’s I was able to get reliable data on the area. To help back up my data I took photos of certain points along the streets I was taking data and results from, hopefully to help give a more visual idea of what the differences were in the wards. I didn’t have many problems with obtaining my data, although finding my way around was a bit of a problem as I don’t really know the areas that well. Finding maps of the wards was a bit of a problem too, as there isn’t much secondary data on the areas. Also when doing the survey sometimes it was hard to score what was ‘a lot of pollution’ and was ‘a bad street’ because though was easy to put them into categories it was harder to clarify where more specifically in the categories they belonged. However I think my data was accurate enough and am pleased with my data collection as a whole. Data Collection Summary: Fig 5. Data collected? Method collected Why collected? Problems collecting? Problems overcome? Changes? Housing Visual Survey Housing helps to represent quality of life Small sample size, making decisions based on observations Use of photographs to help back up my results Larger sample, more roads and houses. Parking / Traffic provision Visual Survey Factor of housing prices, factor of access to area Roads were cramped Took multiple photos Bigger sample Building conditions Visual Survey Value of property, helps to show safety or lack of safety Hard to define between “a lot of damage” and “not a lot”, and pictures of outside doesn’t account for inside Used photos to back up my data Do questionnaires / survey on details of inside of the house.