Theory and Validity of Life Satisfaction Scales

National accounts of subjective well-being are being considered and adopted by nations. In order to be useful for policy deliberations, the measures of life satisfaction must be psychometrically sound. The reliability, validity, and sensitivity to change of life satisfaction measures are reviewed. The scales are stable under unchanging conditions, but are sensitive to changes in circumstances in people’s lives. Several types of data indicate that the scales validly reflect the quality of respondents’ lives: (1) Differences between nations in life satisfaction associated with differences in objective conditions, (2) Differences between groups who live in different circumstances, (3) Correlations with nonself-report measures of life satisfaction, (4) Genetic and physiological associations with life satisfaction, (5) Systematic patterns of change in the scales before, during, and after significant life events, and (6) Prediction by life satisfaction scores of future behaviors such as suicide. The life satisfaction scales can be influenced by factors such as question order, current mood, and mode of presentation, but in most cases these can be controlled. Our model of life satisfaction judgments points to the importance of attention, values, standards, and top-down effects. Although the scales are useful in research on individual well-being, there are policy questions that need more analysis and research, such as which types of subjective well-being measures are most relevant to which types of policies, how standards influence scores, and how best to associate the scores with current policy deliberations.     

Objective and Subjective Quality of Life: an Interactive Model

This paper reviews the relationship between objective and subjective quality of life indicators. It proposes that the interaction of these variables occurs within a system that homeostatically maintains subjective quality of life within a narrow range. Due to the capacity of this system to adapt to varying environmental circumstances, the objective and subjective indicators are normally poorly correlated. However, it is also proposed that very poor objective conditions can defeat homeostasis and, once this occurs, the objective and subjective indicators display stronger covariation. Empirical data are provided to support this model and the implications for understanding the QOL construct are discussed.     

The stability and sensitivity of subjective well-being measures

A longitudinal investigation of the stability and sensitivity of several subjective social indicators is presented. Over a seven year period, data collected from 93 Canadians indicated moderate stability for measures of enjoyment, satisfaction, and life quality. When respondents were divided into “change” and “no change” groups on the basis of their self-reported health status, the self-anchoring ladder of present life quality was found to be sensitive to change. Implications of this methodological inquiry are examined.     

Stability and change in levels and structure of subjective well-being: USA 1972 and 1988

It has long been recognized that more needs to be known about the dynamic behavior of measures of subjective well-being. As the Social Indicators Movement matures, it becomes possible to explore issues of stability and change in measures of perceived life quality. To contribute to this research need, this paper reports results of administering similar measures of subjective well-being to several representative samples of the adult American population assessed 16 years apart — in 1972 and in 1988. Results show that in the United States, which has experienced reasonably continuous economic prosperity and no major social disruptions during these 16 years, thestructure of the subjective well-being measures (i.e. how they relate to one another and how concern-level measures predict global-level measures) has remained remarkably constant. This is in accord with expectation and enhances confidence in the validity and usefulness of the measures. Changes were found in thelevels of some of the measures: For the total population, feelings about life-as-a-whole, oneself, and one's own health became notably more positive; evaluations of own income and the national government also gained; but assessments of one's own family life, social relationships, community, and job remained fairly stable. Some of these gross changes were general throughout the population, but others occurred only for certain age, racial, or socioeconomic groups. Younger cohorts and people with higher educations and incomes showed more gains in subjective well-being than other groups.     

The validity of measures of self-reported well-being

Using a new analytic approach, construct validity estimates are developed for proposed social indicators of self-reported well-being. Two separate investigations are reported: the first involves data on six aspects of well-being each assessed by six methods from 222 adults in one geographic area; the second, a partial replication and extension, involves a more limited set of indicators measured on a sample of 1297 respondents representative of all American adults. The results provide evidence that perceptions of well-being can be measured by single questionnaire or interview items using any of four formats with validities in the range of 0.7 to 0.8 and with correlated method effects contributing less than 10% of the total variance. Two other formats, however, were markedly less valid. These findings are important in view of past criticisms of ‘subjective’ social indicators as lacking in validity, and the findings can guide current efforts to develop new ways to assess the quality of life. Methodologically, the article illustrates the feasibility and utility of deriving parameter estimates of structural equation models of multimethod-multitrait data using Joreskog's LISREL algorithm. The possibility of deriving validity estimates in this way, even when the data include correlated errors, opens new and important opportunities to precisely assess the amount of error variance in much social science data.     

Measures of the perceived overall quality of life

Respondents participating in a national quality of life study were asked to assess their levels of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with each of a set of fifteen domains of their lives. They were also asked to describe their lives as a whole, using both satis-faction and semantic-differential types of scales. Canonical correlation analysis was used to find the combinations of domain-specific and global items with the highest correlation. The two indices derived from this analysis, the Index of Well-being and the Index of Domain Satisfactions, have been examined in relation to a variety of demographic and situational variables, including age, indicators of socioeconomic status, employment status, and size of community. The relationships discovered provide some preliminary evidence for the validity of these indices. The reliability of the measures (as measured cross-sectionally) and their stability over a period of some eight months are both acceptably high. We conclude that both of these measures form acceptable indicators of the perceived overall quality of life.     

Subjective Quality of Life of Young Europeans. Feeling Happy but who Knows why?

Latest developments in modern societies have altered living circumstances. Upcoming insecurities concerning employment and family relationships make life more and more incalculable. Especially young adults throughout the modern world are forced to rethink their life concepts and to desist from the lives of former generations. As difficulties to achieve a successful life increase, one could assume that the young are confronted with the impossibility of feeling happy and satisfied with their lives anymore. Yet, latest social surveys prove wrong. Although increasing unemployment, lower net income and single parenthood make life more difficult for the young, they still enjoy very high subjective quality of life in comparison to the older population. Throughout the paper I argue that it is not the objective conditions that make young adults (15–29 years old) feel overwhelmingly happy. Looking for other sources of explanation of high quality of life among people aged 29 or below, I argue for indicators of social embeddedness as being influential on their assessment of life. But again, the proportion of explained variance is smaller compared to older people. With the help of empirical data taken from the European Social Survey I highlight the differences in life circumstances between the young and the total population. Concerning occupation, habitation (kind of inhabited household) and financial situation, most of the young live under different situations compared to the adult world. But surprisingly, the rates of perceived high quality of life among the young do not vary to such a large extent as among the adults. I show that young adults, often damned to fail social demands because of their withdrawal from social life, are still the most happy in modern (more and more individualizing?) societies. But it gets more difficult to account for the reasons of their happiness.     

MEASURING QUALITY OF LIFE: ECONOMIC,SOCIAL, AND SUBJECTIVE INDICATORS

Thinkers have discussed the “good life” and the desirable society for millennia. In the last decades, scientists offered several alternative approaches to defining and measuring quality of life: social indicators such as health and levels of crime, subjective well-being measures (assessing people's evaluative reactions to their lives and societies), and economic indices. These alternative indicators assess three philosophical approaches to well-being that are based, respectively, on normative ideals, subjective experiences, and the ability to select goods and services that one desires. The strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches are reviewed. It is argued that social indicators and subjective well-being measures are necessary to evaluate a society, and add substantially to the regnant economic indicators that are now favored by policy makers. Each approach to measuring the quality of life contains information that is not contained in the other measures.     

Basic Minimum Needs,Quality of Life and Selected Correlates: Explorations in Villages in Northern India

For those involved in international development, one of the major goals is an improvement in the quality of life of the poor. Bhargava and Chakrabati (1992: 133) see the “primary objective of development at any given time is to improve the quality of life”. Indeed, the mission statement for an international development organization explicitly commits itself to the improvement of the quality of life for the “poorest of the poor” (DID, 1994). Social indicators, as “transeconomic” measures of quality of life, have “become an integral part of 'development indicators”' (Kao and Liu, 1984: 400; see, also Kahn, 1991). The connection between quality of life and development extends beyond the Third World. For example, in the U.S. Myers (1987) found quality of life influenced inmigration to Austin, Texas, thus affecting its economic development. Undoubtedly the majority of the connections between social indicators and development has been examined at the macro, or national levels using economic, health, education and other objective, comparative indices. Recognizing that such measures as GNP are oftentimes inadequate, assorted indices have been derived to gauge the changes in social development over time, e.g., the well-known Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) constructed by the Overseas Development Council (Morris, 1976). Many of these tend to focus on objective, material indicators (commodity possessions) as opposed to the more subjective ones (Anand and Ravallion, 1993). It is not the purpose of this paper to examine the various critics' arguments about the strengths and weaknesses of extant macro versus micro indices, but rather to lend support for the general need to assess development and social change through social indicators, whether macro or micro, objective or subjective. Ultimately, the purpose of the assessment should guide which social indicators are selected. The purpose of this paper is to examine several issues arising from the linkages between development efforts and quality of life (QOL). Using empirical data which were gathered to evaluate a community development project in the Garhwal region of Northern India, several issues, germane to both social indicators and development, will be investigated. These include: (1) the relationship between “Basic Minimum Needs” (BMNs) and QOL, (2) some methodological innovations for measuring both BMNs and QOL, and (3) selected correlates of BMNs and social indicators of QOL for Garhwali villagers. Before describing the project and its findings, we will first place it in the overall development context.     

Quality of life indicators and health: Current status and emerging conceptions

Quality of life is an increasingly common theme in the health status and health promotion literatures. Six approaches that consider quality of life and health are reviewed. These are (a) health-related quality of life; (b) quality of life as social diagnosis in health promotion; (c) quality of life among persons with developmental disabilities; (d) quality of life as social indicators; (e) the Centre for Health Promotion (University of Toronto) model, and (f) Lindstrom's quality of life model. Each approach is considered as to its emphasis on objective or subjective indicators, individual or system-level measurement, value-laden or value-neutral assumptions, and potential relationship to social policy and social change goals. The links among the social indicators, quality of life, and health promotions areas are examined.     

Stability and Sensitivity in Perceived Quality of Life Measures: Some Panel Results

The aim of this study was to test a fundamental assumption concerning 27 of the most frequently used measures to assess aspects of the quality of people’s lives, e.g., measures concerning happiness, satisfaction with life as a whole, with the quality of one’s life, with domains of life (job, marriage, friendships), and with perceived gaps between what one has compared to what one wants, what one’s neighbor has and so on. The assumption is that such measures are sensitive to changes in the circumstances of one’s life measured by self-perceptions of change and by self-assessments of the net balance of salient positive and negative events one has experienced in some specified period of time. A total of 462 residents of British Columbia distributed across 3 different panels completed mailed-out questionnaires at 3 points in time in 2005, 06 and 07. Among other things, we found that measuring year-by-year changes in respondents’ life circumstances by reports of their own perception and experienced life events, on average the values of the 27 variables changed in ways that were consistent with respondents’ reported changes in 49.7% of the cases examined. The success rate of the assumption using self-perceptions of change (61.7%) was much higher than the success rate using a net balance of experienced events (37.3%).     

Objective and subjective determinants of prospective residential mobility

The increasing interest in subjective as well as objective measures of well-being raises the issue of the relative importance of these two different types of measures when they are included as independent variables in analytical or predictive models. In the research reported here, survey data are used to evaluate the relative importance of objective and subjective indicators in providing an understanding of why households desire to move. Overall, it is found that subjective indicators add considerably to the explanation of mobility inclinations over and above that contributed by objective indicators. A comparison of explanatory powers for the full sets of objective and subjective predictors within two length of residence subgroups indicates some interesting differences, however. Objective and subjective predictors are close in explanatory power for longer-term residents, while subjective measures are considerably more important for shorter-term residents.     

Job satisfaction as an indicator of the quality of employment

It is suggested that the quality of employment should be assessed from the value perspectives of the employer and of society as well as the perspective of the worker. The prevailing conception of the nature of job satisfaction, and the associated measurement methods, provide useful but unnecessarily limited indicators of the quality of employment. An enlarged conception is offered as to the nature of job satisfaction, its causes, and its possible consequences. The implications of this conception for the utility of satisfaction measures as social indicators are examined as to three aspects: (1) The psychology of job satisfaction; (2) The sociology of job satisfaction; (2) The approach and technology of using subjective satisfaction measures in conjunction with other indicators. The view is expressed that direct measures of subjective job satisfaction are an essential component in any effort to make comparisons or monitor changes in the quality of employment, but that such measures, like other subjective and objective indicators, have ambiguous meaning if used alone.     

The quality of life in large American cities: Objective and subjective social indicators

The concept of ‘quality of life’ as a tool of comparative social indicators research is analyzed. Inter-city comparisons of objective and subjective measures of well being are presented and the distinctiveness of these two dimensions of the quality of life is documented. The paper concludes with some observations on the implications that this distinctiveness has for the use of the concept ‘quality of life’ in future social indicators research.     

Work-Related Demands Emanating from Social Change and Their Relation to Trait-Like and Occasion-Specific Aspects of Subjective Well-Being

Following current macro-level social change people are increasingly confronted with new demands encompassing perceived uncertainties concerning their job and career prospects. Studies utilizing concurrent assessments showed that perceiving a high accumulation (“load”) of such demands is negatively related to individuals’ subjective well-being. Without further evidence the interpretation of the direction of these effects, however, is equivocal. Based on the concept that individuals have a rather stable trait-like level of subjective well-being from which they may vary when confronted with changes of the external ecology, the current study examined the relationship between the reported load of demands and subjective well-being assessed as general life satisfaction and average satisfaction in domains of life (i.e., family, work, finances, and leisure). We expected that a higher load of demands corresponds to a temporary decline in well-being, while at the same time differences in the stable trait-like level of well-being account for differences in the reported demand load. For the purpose of our study, we analyzed three annual waves of assessment of German adults aged between 18 and 43 years (N = 488). Utilizing a trait-state-occasion model, we separated trait-like aspects of well-being from occasion-specific deviations. Overall, our results confirmed our expectation that effects indeed run in both directions. The higher the reported load of work-related demands, the more respondents’ well-being negatively deviated from the stable trait-like level. Beyond that a higher trait-like level of well-being corresponded to a lower demand load. Both effects revealed almost equal strength and remained stable after controlling for participants’ employment status, family status, and educational attainment.     

Errors in Recalling Childhood Socio-economic Status: The Role of Anchoring and Household Formation in South Africa

In the absence of longitudinal data that track individuals over an extended period of time, information on childhood socio-economic status can be provided by questions that ask adults to recall their parents’ education or their economic status at childhood. The usefulness of these data, however, requires that people are willing to report this information, and that these reports do not vary systematically over time, for example in response to changes in current circumstances. In this paper, we evaluate recall data for South Africa, collected from the same adults in the first two waves of a national panel survey. We show that the data, particularly on father’s education, are compromised by very low and selective response, reflecting the fragmented nature of many South African families. Among those who do provide information, parental education is reported more consistently over time than the subjective appraisals of childhood economic status. However, we find also that both sets of indicators are sensitive to changes in current income, which would be consistent with anchoring effects. Furthermore changes in subjective appraisals of the past are highly correlated with changes in subjective appraisals of the present.     

Young Women’s Dynamic Family Size Preferences in the Context of Transitioning Fertility

Dynamic theories of family size preferences posit that they are not a fixed and stable goal but rather are akin to a moving target that changes within individuals over time. Nonetheless, in high-fertility contexts, changes in family size preferences tend to be attributed to low construct validity and measurement error instead of genuine revisions in preferences. To address the appropriateness of this incongruity, the present study examines evidence for the sequential model of fertility among a sample of young Malawian women living in a context of transitioning fertility. Using eight waves of closely spaced data and fixed-effects models, we find that these women frequently change their reported family size preferences and that these changes are often associated with changes in their relationship and reproductive circumstances. The predictability of change gives credence to the argument that ideal family size is a meaningful construct, even in this higher-fertility setting. Changes are not equally predictable across all women, however, and gamma regression results demonstrate that women for whom reproduction is a more distant goal change their fertility preferences in less-predictable ways.     

Multidimensional Wellbeing: An Index of Quality of Life in a Developing Economy

Human wellbeing indices can shed light on a society’s quality of life. This study ranks human wellbeing by employing objective and subjective indicators of quality of life for hundred districts of Pakistan. Households level data used for the analysis includes ‘The Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey’ for the year 2006–2007. The human wellbeing is examined in four domains: education, health, living conditions and economic situation. Principal component analysis is employed for indexing human wellbeing, rated in five quintiles are generated. The paper demonstrates the importance of education, health and living condition domains in determining the human wellbeing. Objective indicators of education i.e., adult literacy rate, net primary enrolment and gender equality in education are important variables in ranking of districts. Economic status of the households and communities are important variables in subjective perception of wellbeing. The results indicate substantial variation in human wellbeing among districts of Pakistan It may be considered that disparity in objective condition and in subjective perceptions are adequately depicting wellbeing differences. Finally, it is argued that objective indicators and subjective wellbeing measures are needed in unison to understand human quality of life and to make informed policy decisions.     

Development of a social monitoring system at the local level: An experiment in the Southern Region of the Democratic Republic of Sudan

Subjective indicators of life quality are used frequently in the planning and decision making process. The limitations inherent in the use of subjective indicators often go unnoticed among those most likely to use such data in the context of planned change. We direct attention to a potential source of error in subjective evaluations of community services and facilities. Specifically, we utilize repeated measures to test for response bias that results from placing items in alternative sections of the same survey instrument. Evidence concerning the hypothesized presence of systematic bias was mixed. When overall service evaluation items were embedded within a section devoted exclusively to that service, considerable systematic bias was observed. The findings indicate that the choice of question format depends upon the ultimate use to which the data will be put.     

Research on Assessment of Life Satisfaction of Children and Adolescents

Over the years, various psychologists haveissued calls for greater attention to a scienceof positive psychology, which focuses onstudying conditions that promote optimal humanand societal development. Recent calls (e.g.,McCullough and Snyder, 2000; Seligman andCsikszentmihalyi, 2000) have furthered interestin studies of the nature and determinants ofthe good life. Such a science, along with thecreation of prevention and interventionprograms informed by the expanded scientificframework, is expected to improve the qualityof life for all individuals, not justindividuals who are at risk or who alreadydemonstrate psychopathological conditions. Tocontrast with the previous emphasis onpsychopathology, the development of a positivepsychology requires constructs and measuresthat reflect the full range of humanfunctioning, incorporating indicators of highlevels of wellness as well aspsychopathological functioning. This articlediscusses one such construct, lifesatisfaction, that has been studied extensivelyin adulthood (see Diener et al., 1999), butwhich has only recently gained attention withchildren and adolescents (see Bender, 1997;Huebner, 1997). This article reviews lifesatisfaction assessment research with childrenand adolescents, specifically with regard toconstruct validity. In doing so, the followingareas are addressed: models of lifesatisfaction; convergent validity; discriminantvalidity; relationships with other well-beingmeasures; relationships with external,environmental circumstances; relationships withdemographic variables; cultural factors; groupdifferences on life satisfaction measures;predictive relationships; and stability of lifesatisfaction reports. Conclusions regardingthe validity of the life satisfaction constructare formulated. Recommendations for futureresearch are also discussed.