What Does It Mean to be a Compassionate City?

Many cities have made movements toward incorporating compassion as a policy priority, but there is little existing research focused on measuring levels of compassion within the context of communities. In order to determine the current prevalence of compassion in a city and develop strategies for strengthening compassion, a valid and replicable tool for evaluating the presence of compassion in cities was needed. 

The purpose of this research was to develop, validate, and standardize the Compassionate Cities Index which examines how individuals feel compassion and act or do not act with compassion in the context of their specific community, resources, and needs. This study followed a multilevel design with a focus on objective contextual data gathered through existing data sources and subjective individual data gathered with an individualized survey and semi-structured interviews. Nine compassion domains were identified, namely psychological well-being, health, educational attainment, community disparities, governance, business, community vitality, ecological resilience, and standard of living. Sixty two objectives measures across the nine domains were collected from public and partner databases. The survey component of the index measured 15 subjective individual indicators of compassion such as forgiveness, empathy, hope, guilt, spirituality, and sense of belonging.

Approximately 3,200 participants ages 18 and older completed the survey portion of study. In order to gain a representative sample of the city, participants were recruited from all 37 standard zip codes of the metro county. The Compassion Index was constructed using Alkire-Foster methodology, a simple, rigorous and decomposable methodology used for measuring poverty (Alkire & Foster, 2011) and for developing the Bhutan Gross National Happiness Index (Ura, 2012). The Compassion Index was created from two numbers: headcount ratio and breadth. Headcount ratio included the final percentage of people who were found to be compassionate. Breadth measured the percentage of domains in which people who were not yet compassionate were are sufficient.

To construct the Compassion Index, the following research methodology was followed: 1) Sufficiency thresholds were developed for each indicator to show what level a community needs in order to enjoy sufficiency in each of the indicators 2) Applied weights to the domains and indicators to account for importance and measurement error; 3) Applied the Compassion Gradiant to identify 4 levels of compassion in which the community fell, 4) Selected the middle cutoff as the compassion threshold and identified two groups, namely compassionate people and not yet compassionate people; 5) Identified among the not yet compassionate people in what percentage of domains they lack sufficiency and in what percentage they enjoy sufficiency; 7) Calcuated the Compassion Index and its associated statistics.

The study was able to reduce the amount of objective indicators to 32 and the subjective indicators to 10. Furthermore, the Index provided detailed information on the compassion gap between zip codes in the metro county that was then able to guide the 2020 Metro Plan of the city. This presentation will explain the Alkire-Foster Method and how it was used to develop the Compassion Index. Application for other cities will also be discussed.