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In this paper results are reported of a random sample survey of 698 residents of Prince George, British Columbia taken in May 2001. The main aim of the survey was to measure respondents' assessments of local police services in Prince George, and their relative impact on the quality of respondents' lives. Generally speaking, the evaluations were quite favourable. For example, in response to the question 'what kind of a job do you think the RCMP are doing', 30% said a 'very good job' and 38% said a 'fairly good job', compared to 2% who said they were doing a 'very poor job' and 4% more a 'fairly poor job'. Compared to a 1997 survey, fewer people thought that crime had increased in the past few years, which is actually consistent with official crime statistics. The biggest perceived problem was with speeding and careless driving, although respondents rated traffic and highway enforcement as the least important of a dozen kinds of police activities. People most appreciated police work aimed at preventing crimes. Of the things people did to protect themselves from becoming a victim, keeping items in their cars out of sight headed the list. As in previous surveys in this community, highest levels of satisfaction were expressed for living partners and family relations generally. Estimating the relative impact of three police/crime related variables (satisfaction with feelings of personal safety around one's home and in one's community, and with local policing services) on the quality of life measured in five different ways in the context of 12 other variables, it was found that only the last variable (satisfaction with policing services) had a statistically significant association to the quality of life measured in three of the five ways. Forty percent of the variation in happiness scores and 63% of the variation in life satisfaction scores could be explained by five and six predictors, respectively, without any significant association with satisfaction with policing services. Sixty-two percent of the variation in satisfaction with respondents' overall quality of life scores could be explained by eight predictors, with satisfaction with policing services as the third most influential predictor behind satisfaction with respondents' self-esteem and friendships. Sixty-one percent of the variation in satisfaction with respondents' standard of living scores was explained by seven predictors, with satisfaction with policing services being least influential. Finally, 76% of the variation in an index of subjective well-being (summing the scores of the other four global indicators) was explained by nine predictors, with satisfaction with policing services being second least influential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this essay is to build a bridge between two intersecting areas of research, social indicators research on the one hand and health-related quality of life research on the other. The first substantive section of the paper introduces key concepts and definitions in the social indicators research tradition. e.g., social indicators, positive, negative, input and output indicators, social report and quality of life. After that, there is a section reviewing some historical origins and motives of social indicators researchers, beginning roughly with Jeremy Bentham's 'felicific calculus' and ending with the search for a comprehensive accounting scheme capable of measuring the quality of human existence with social. economic and environmental indicators. Results of eleven surveys are reviewed which were undertaken to explain happiness on the basis of levels of satisfaction that respondents got from a dozen specific domains of their lives, e.g., satisfaction with their jobs, family relations and health. On average, for the eleven samples, we were able lo explain 38% of the variance in reported happiness from some subset of the predictor variables. Satisfaction with one's own health was never the strongest predictor of happiness in any sample. In five of the eleven samples, satisfaction with one's own health failed to enter the final explanatory regression equation for lack of statistical significance. The results in this section of the essay show that different groups of people with different life circumstances, resources and constraints use different mixtures of ingredients to determine their happiness. After examining some research revealing the relative importance of people's satisfaction with their health to their overall happiness, I consider some studies revealing the importance of people's self-reported health to their overall happiness. Self-reported health is measured primarily by the eight dimensions of SF-36. When a variety of additional potential predictors are entered into our regression equation, 44% of the variance in happiness scores is explained, but only one of the eight dimensions of SF-36 remains, namely. Mental Health. The latter accounts for a mere four percentage points out of the total 44. Thus, self-reported health has relatively little to contribute toward respondents' reported happiness, and its measured contribution is significantly affected by the number and kinds of potential predictors employed. Two approaches to explaining people's satisfaction with their own health are considered. First, using the same set of health-related potential predictors of overall happiness, we are able to explain 56% of the variance in respondents' satisfaction with their own health. Then, using Multiple Discrepancies Theory, we are able to explain about 51% of the variation in satisfaction with one's own health scores for 8.076 undergraduates, with highs of 76% for a sample of Finnish females and 72% for Korean males. Accordingly, it is reasonable to conclude that if one's aim is to explain people's satisfaction with their own health, the potential predictors assembled in MDT can provide quite a bit and sometimes even more explanatory power than a reasonably broad set of measures of self-reported health. In the penultimate section of the essay it is argued that there are good reasons for carefully distinguishing ideas of health and quality of life, and for not interpreting SF-36 and SIP scores as measures of the quality of life. It is suggested that we might all be better off if the term 'health-related quality of life' is simply abandoned. However, since this is unlikely to happen, it is strongly recommended that researchers be much more careful with their usage of the phrase and their interpretation of purported measures of whatever the phrase is supposed to designate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]