SOCIAL INDICATORS AND THE CONCEPT OF LEVEL OF LIVING.

The desire for more effective indicators of well-being is best reflected in the "social indicators movement" which began in the United States in the mid-sixties and has since spread to embrace Great Britain, Canada and Japan. The rapid expansion of interest in the development of social indicators has, not surprisingly, produced numerous problems of definition, measurement and integration which have not yet been resolved. Furthermore, the term "social indicator" has become devalued with increasingly more generous interpretations, so that even the most modest of statistical series have become so named. It has been suggested that the term should be restricted to those measures which can be related to a sociological model of some kind. Much of the past neglect of the importance and potential of the concept must be attributed to confusion over terminology and definitions. Researchers tended to work to their own definitions of standard of living, level of living, plane of living, satisfaction of consumption and norm of living, whilst in the course of time the problem has been compounded by the popular usage of "standard of living" and, more recently, of "quality of life" as terms synonymous with most of these concepts.