Search

Introduces a series of articles about the social indicators of the quality of life, which appeared in the January 1, 2003 issue of the journal "Essays on the Quality of Life."

This paper presents a brief overview mainly of the author's contributions to quality-of-life research over the past 25 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments around the world are embracing the digital revolution to enhance services for their citizens. However, the development of quality electronic services and delivery systems that are efficient and effective is only one way to improve the citizens΄ quality of life. The essence of e-government lies as well in engaging citizenry into the use of e-government services. As a result, this paper builds on the elementary concept of the time that citizens spend on their transactions with the Public Administration to provide a) an evaluation of e-government services in terms of the benefits that their use involves for citizens compared to the use of conventional ones b) an evaluation of the actual utilization of e-government services by the citizens. To overcome the impediment of subjectivity and uncertainty that is innate in the citizens΄ estimations regarding the time spent, fuzzy triangular numbers are adopted. The proposed framework is then applied for the case of Greece using actual data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contains a global review of recent work on social indicators or quality of life measurement and more specific reviews of work on job satisfaction, satisfaction and happiness with life as a whole, and martial and sexual satisfaction. A variety of species of gap-theoretic explanatory theories are described and their alleged successes are noted. Finally, multiple discrepancies theories are sketched and some results of their application are indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter reviews the literature in relation to the effect that employment and method of employment has on the quality of life of people with intellectual disabilities. The chapter first summarizes the literature on whether employment affects the quality of life of people with intellectual disabilities, and then reports those papers that investigate whether differences exist in the quality of life of people with intellectual disabilities employed in sheltered employment compared with open employment. The chapter concludes with a call for more research in the area, specifically highlighting gaps in our current knowledge and identifying areas worthy of future research on this matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic neurological disorders in their advanced phase are characterized by a progressive loss of mobility (use of upper and lower limbs), speech and social life. Some of these pathologies, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and multiple sclerosis, are paradigmatic of these deficits. High technology communication instruments, such as eye tracking, can be an extremely important possibility to reintroduce these patients in their family and social life, in particular when they suffer severe disability. This paper reports and describes the results of an ongoing experimentation about Eye Tracking impact on the quality of life of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. The aim of the experimentation is to evaluate if and when eye tracking technologies have a positive impact on patients΄ lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper provides a review of the past 30 years of research on the relationships between migration or residential mobility and the quality of life broadly construed, mainly in Canada and the United States. In the final section a check-list of critical issues in quality-of-life research is given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring health outcomes is critical for individual and societal decision making. This chapter briefly reviews the field of health outcomes modeling in general and provides detailed theoretical background for one specific class of such models, the Quality-Adjusted Life Years model, which is primarily grounded in operations research and utility theory. The chapter describes methodological issues and concludes with a discussion of promising areas for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theses supported in this essay are that the world is to some extent constructed by each of us, that it can and ought to be constructed in a more benign way, that such construction will require more trust than most people are currently willing to grant, and that most of us will be better off if most of us can manage to be more trusting in spite of our doubts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A measure of feminism is introduced, and a case is made for the acceptability of its levels of reliability, criterion-related, content, construct and discriminant-validity. Feminism is shown to be related to such features of the quality of life as happiness and being a good person. Survey results are reported from a sample of 431 members of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women and 413 undergraduate women from the University of Guelph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this investigation was to explain the impact of crime-related issues on satisfaction with the quality of life, satisfaction with life as a whole and happiness in the city of Prince George, British Columbia. As explanatory variables, we had measures of respondent fears of and actual cases of victimization. Indexes of Neighbourhood Problems, Police Performance, Neighbourhood Worries, Defensive Behaviour, beliefs about increases in local crime, satisfaction with personal and family safety, and satisfaction with a variety of domains of life (e.g., friendships, financial security, health). Collectively such variables could explain only 5% of the variation in happiness scores, 7% of the variation in life satisfaction scores and 9% of the variation in satisfaction with the quality of life scores. However, they could explain 38% of the variation in overall neighbourhood satisfaction scores. When measures of satisfaction with family life, health, self-esteem, etc. were added, we found that crime related issues were simply displaced by the other measures and that we could explain 31 % of the variation in overall happiness scores, 58% of the variation in life satisfaction scores and 59% of the variation in satisfaction with the overall quality of life scores. We conclude, therefore, that crime-related issues have relatively little impact on people's satisfaction with the quality of their lives, with life satisfaction or happiness here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this investigation was to explain the impact of people's self-reported health on their levels of satisfaction with their health, and the impact of these things plus satisfaction with other specific domains of their lives on the perceived quality of their lives. The latter was operationalized as general happiness, satisfaction with life as a whole and overall satisfaction with the quality of life. Seven hundred and twenty-three (723) usable questionnaires returned from a mailout random sample of 2500 households of Prince George, British Columbia in November 1998 formed the working data-set for our analyses. Among other things, mean respondent scores on the SF-36 health profile were found to be lower than published norms from the UK, USA, Netherlands and Sweden, but higher than scores from Aberdeen, Scotland. Mean scores on the CES-D depression scale also indicated that our respondents tended to have more depressive symptoms than comparison groups in Winnipeg and the USA. A review of trends in mean scores on 17 quality of life items (e.g., satisfaction with family life, financial security, recreation, etc.) from 1994, 1997 and 1998 revealed that there were only 7 statistically significant changes across the four year period and they were all negative. Multivariate regression analysis showed that health status measured with a variety of indicators could explain 56% of the variation in respondents' reported satisfaction with their health. A combination of health status plus domain satisfaction indicators could explain 53% of the variation in respondents' reported happiness, 68% of reported life satisfaction and 63% of reported satisfaction with the overall quality of life. Sixty percent of the explained variation in happiness scores was attributable to self-reported health scores, while only 18% of the explained variation in satisfaction with life and with the overall quality of life scores was attributable self-reported health scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses militarism and the quality of life in the Canadian and U.S. arms industry. An overview is presented on the social indicators for Canada and the U.S. covering the years from about 1963 to 1983. Following this, the Canadian federal government expenditures is reviewed in general for the period from 1974 to 1986. A summary of information on the Canadian arms industry, including production and export figures is also provided. Accordingly, arguments are raised against the Canadian production and export of military arms broadly construed.