Quality of Life Indicators

Two types of survey measures fall under the quality of life domain. The first is psychological measures used to assess satisfaction in response to a life situation, typically an individual-level measure of quality of life in the context of the mental health of persons living with chronic health diseases. The second is a social indicator, designed to assess life quality for the purpose of creating aggregated indices for making systemic comparisons. Though the former has received a higher volume of research, the latter is more central to public opinion research.

Assessing the well-being of individuals and communities may be one of the most important contributions public opinion researchers can make. By providing benchmarks, researchers can elucidate the antecedents and consequences of individual life satisfaction as well as assess the progress of communities over time. At the same time, measuring quality of life is extremely complex as it encompasses myriad dimensions, including both material conditions and psychological orientations.

The challenge for social indicators researchers has been to come up with objective measures that are both comprehensive, in terms of capturing the various relevant dimensions of quality of life, and non-ethnocentric, in that they do not reflect researcher biases in terms of what constitutes life quality. However, any attempt to measure quality of life inherently involves making subjective decisions about what constitutes “quality.” As such, these measures will always be subject to charges of ethnocentricity. However flawed such measures are, they do serve as a point of comparison and a yardstick against which to measure progress.

The unit of analysis is one important consideration in the assessment of life quality. That is, will the measure describe differences in the life quality of individuals, communities, or nations? At the micro level, measures attempt to assess the psychological and material well-being of individuals. Other indicators have been designed to assess the quality of life afforded by a particular community or nation. Macro-level indices most often are based on indicators that are aggregated and reported in terms of mean levels; however, when it comes to larger social units, the dispersion of such aggregated measures is also significant in order to take into account inequality in the distribution of resources that contribute to quality of life.

Quality of life measurement has typically involved a combination of economic, psychological, and social conditions. Economic indicators include estimates of standard of living, disposable income, wages, savings, bankruptcy rates, and other such criteria. Among the dimensions of social conditions are measures of crime, education, employment, crowding, pollution, aesthetic surroundings, housing quality, birth rates, infant mortality, longevity, doctors per capita, and health care. Psychological dimensions include assessments of happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem, self-efficacy, marital satisfaction, family life, friendships, health, housing, jobs, housework, neighborhoods, communities, education, standard of living, financial state, and life in general. These measures may be classified into two groups: external measures, which refer to measures of the structural conditions that impinge upon an individual (often referred to as social indicators), and internal measures, which refer to indicators based on respondents' perceptions of their own life situations (often referred to as measures of social well-being).

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