May 28 2008
digested reading family friendly
Readers Digest, asked 1,162 of its readers, who are also parents, and enjoy completing surveys to rate 12 features of a ‘good place to bring up a family’ on a 10 point scale. It’s not clear how they picked these 12 features. Average Readers Digest Survey-completing parents ratings were:
1 Good state schools 8.4
2 Low crime rate 8.4
3 Good local hospitals 7.7
4 Affordable family housing 7.7
5 High employment 7.2
6 Low risk of flooding 6.8
7 Lots of families live there 6.4
8 Local universities/colleges 6.0
9 Under an hour to a major city 5.7
10 Warm, dry weather 5.1
11 Under an hour to the coast 4.9
12 Under an hour to a National Park 4.8
It looks like these average ratings were subsequently used by Readers Digest employees as ‘weightings’ for statistics provided by other national sources (e.g. home office crime figures) to create rankings of 408 UK ‘authorities’ as family-friendly or not. Reading Borough mysteriously came 408th.
I still can’t escape from the fact that the people who made the rankings probably both read the Readers digest and complete it’s surveys….
digested reading family friendly
