An Oil Boom’s Effect on Quality of Life (QoL): Lessons from Western North Dakota

This article presents a holistic framework to understand the effect of an oil boom on quality of life (QoL) in western North Dakota. Compared to quantitative QoL studies that focus on cities and urban QoL or studies that compare/contrast QoL between different communities, this descriptive and qualitative article focuses on the heterogeneous QoL perceptions among different stakeholder groups, within a community, in a rural setting, during a period of rapid social and economic transformation. The focus allows for a new way of looking at the significance of changes caused by oil development on QoL of stakeholders in a rural community, which provides a useful lens for studying QoL changes in many other rural communities currently experiencing unconventional oil/gas development in the USA. The framework presented captures the contextual determinants and indicators that constitute QoL in a rural context. The findings show that some significant impacts of the boom (both positive and negative) affect QoL of everyone in the community, while other impacts only affect certain stakeholder groups based on their positioning in the economic/income structure and level of exposure to local inflation. Implications of the findings on community planning and development on ways to improve QoL are presented and discussed.