The Impact of Globalization on a Country's Quality of Life: Toward an Integrated Model

The purpose of the paper is to develop a set of theoretical propositions to explain the impact of globalization on a country's quality of life (QOL). In this paper, we describe how globalization impacts the quality of life of residents of a country by first articulating the globalization construct (in terms of inflows and outflows of goods, services, capital, technology, and workers), second, articulating the country's QOL construct (in terms of economic, consumer, social, and health well being), and showing the relationships between globalization and a country's QOL. We develop a set of theoretical propositions to capture these relationships. Finally, we discuss the public policy and research implications of this study.     

Spiritual well-being: A neglected subject in quality of life research

The social indicators and quality of life (QOL) movements have given scant attention to religiosity, in spite of theoretical and empirical evidence that it is related to personal and social well-being. Reasons for this include the constitutional provisions pertinent to religion, problems of funding, the lack of measuring instruments, conceptual and theoretical difficulties, biases of researchers, and the lack of consensus regarding the definition of QOL. A partial solution to this neglec is to engage in conceptual, theoretical, qualitative, and empirical research on spiritual well-being (SWB). The authors indicate its potential and some initial steps toward bringing SWB into the QOL movement.     

Using Perceived Health to Test the Construct-related Validity of Global Quality of Life

Quality of life (QOL) is considered as aglobal, yet unidimensional, subjectiveassessment of one's satisfaction with life. Weexamine the construct validity of the availableindicators of global QOL by constructing acausal model in which QOL is viewed as causallyresponding to several dimensions of perceivedhealth. Global QOL is measured with fiveindicators derived from the literature, andperceived health is measured by eightdimensions of the SF-36 Health Survey. Thestructural equation model describes the QOL andperceived health assessments of 306 coronaryartery bypass graft (CABG) patients andprovides a stringent test of theunidimensionality of the global QOL indicators.The evidence regarding QOL is worrisome, butnot devastating. The acceptable model fit wasachieved by introducing direct effects leadingfrom the General Health Perceptions concept totwo of the five indicators of global QOL. Thissuggests that there are some mechanisms thatinfluence these indicators without firstaltering QOL, or that these indicators are notresponding in unison to QOL. Furthermore, theFaces QOL indicator required measurement errorcorrelations to two of the perceived healthindicators. This also suggests that there aremechanisms beyond pure QOL that act upon thisindicator. But the problematic effects anderror correlations are modest, so the evidenceagainst these indicators is not particularlystrong. Overall, the Self-Anchoring StrivingScale (SASS) indicator and the Life-as-a -Wholeindicator (from Multiple Discrepancies Theory)seem to be the cleanest indicators of globalQOL. General health perceptions and perceivedmental health both influenced global QOL, whilethe other six health perception concepts had noconsistent impact on global QOL.     

Quality of Life and Quality of Living Conditions in Rural Areas: Distinctively Perceived and Quantitatively Distinguished

In the last decades, large amount of effort and resources have been spent in projects and programs aiming to develop rural communities. The ultimate goal of such projects is supposed to be the improvement of the Quality of Life (QOL) of these communities. Although improving the Quality of the Living Conditions (QLC) is an acceptable strategy to reach that goal, all too often there is significant confusion between the two concepts. In this paper we argue that QLC and QOL can not be dissociated, but they are distinct. Our hypothesis is that we can make this distinction objectively. For that purpose, we develop an Index of the Quality of Living Conditions (IQLC) and an Index of the Quality of Life (IQOL). Each index is obtained by combining partial indicators of the conditions of several aspects in several dimensions (e.g., social, environmental, and economic). While the assessment of living conditions to obtain the IQLC is done by project staff, the IQOL is based on the manifestation of the farmers about their satisfaction in living those conditions. The IQLC and the IQOL result, then, from different views of the same aspects of life in a given context. Therefore, their objective measurement can be a useful instrument to evaluate the effectiveness of improvements on living conditions proposed by institutions and their professionals to improve the quality of life of rural communities.     

Quality of Life Indexes for National Policy: Review and Agenda for Research

A number of governments and public policy institutes have developed Quality of Life Indexes – statistics that attempt to measure the quality of life for entire states or regions. We develop 14 criteria for determining the validity and usefulness of such QOL indexes to public policy. We then review 22 of the most-used QOL indexes from around the world. We conclude that many of the indexes are successful in that they are reliable, have established time series measures, and can be disaggregated to study subpopulations. However, many fall short in four areas: (1) indexes vary greatly in their coverage and definitions of domains of QOL, (2) none of the indexes distinguish among the concepts of input, throughput, and output that are used by public policy analysts, (3) they fail to show how QOL outputs are sensitive to public policy inputs, and (4) none have examined convergent validity against each other. We conclude that many of these indexes are potentially very useful for public policy and recommend research to further improve them.     

Quality of Life and Personality Development: A Reply to Land and Michalos

Land and Michael’s (this issue) offer an excellent overview of the evolving status of the social indicators movement, with thoughtful recommendations for future research. I argue that QOL researchers may want to consider paying increased attention to advances in the science of personality development, such as those articulated in McAdams' (The art and science of personality development. Guilford Press, New York, 2015), in conceptualizing comprehensive assessments of the QOL. Specifically, McAdams' synthesis of the literature on personal agency should provide a useful beginning for developmentally-informed discussions of the potential evolving nature of QOL and its antecedents, correlates, and consequences, with the goal of ensuring greater relevance of QOL evaluations to all age groups.     

Towards a European System of Social Indicators: Theoretical Framework and System Architecture

By developing a ``European System of Social Indicators'' the scientificcommunity as well as policy makers are being provided with a theoreticallywell-grounded as well as methodologically sound tool of social measurementto be used to continuously monitor and analyse the development of welfareas well as general trends of social change in European societies. Thearticle focuses on the development of a conceptual framework, to be usedto guide and justify the selection of measurement dimensions and indicators.Based on an extensive review of theoretical concepts of welfare and anexploration of political goals of societal development at the Europeanlevel, six major categories of goal dimensions, referring to the conceptsof quality of life, social cohesion and sustainability have been identifiedas the backbones of the conceptual framework. In addition, the articlepresents the main features of the architecture of the European System ofSocial Indicators and lays out its main structural elements and characteristics.     

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.     

CONSTRUCTING A HEALTH AND SOCIAL INDICATOR FRAMEWORK FOR INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY HEALTH RESEARCH

Health and social indicators that capture the distinct historical, social, and cultural contexts of Indigenous communities can play an important role in informing the planning and delivery of community interventions. There is currently considerable interest in cataloguing and vetting meaningful community-level health and social indicators that could be applied to research and health promotion activities in Indigenous communities in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, inclusive of conventional indicators as well as measures developed specifically for use in or with Indigenous communities. To avoid haphazard selection of indicators, and to assure the comprehensiveness and relevance of any given set of indicators, a framework that can accommodate and conceptually classify indicators representing a full range of domains is required. We report here on the development of a conceptual framework, by which Indigenous community indicators, and more general community-level social indicators, can be sorted, catalogued, and systematically classified within four hierarchical levels. The indicator framework was developed across Canada, Australia and New Zealand in consultation with academic researchers and Indigenous community stakeholders, building from established health and social indicator systems. The Indigenous indicator framework permits Indigenous communities, public health researchers, and funding agencies to compare and select the most appropriate indicators for application in specific contexts from the multitude of existing indicators.     

Optimally Scaled Quality-of-Life Indicators

When studying quality of life, researchers have to rely on the subjective evaluations, which are typically categorized, collected in surveys. When statistical analysis are applied to these data, they used to apply the simplistic approach including (i) direct quantification, which assigns discrete numerical values to ordinal response scale, and (ii) complete-case analysis, which discards all observations selecting any of the off-scales choices like Dont Know No Answer from the analysis. The present paper examines the disadvantages of this approach and introduces the optimal scaling method as a remedy. The new scheme attempts to restore the continuity property of the measurements as well as provide estimates for most of the missing responses. Application of the new scheme to the Hong Kong QOL data illustrates how the scheme works, demonstrates its advantages and shows how the QOL indicators, the global QOL indicator as well as its inherited indicators, can be constructed from series of principal component analyses. Factor analysis of the 20 life domain indicators verifies Wan's opinion (1992) that the global sense of well-being can best be captured by two dimensions, namely the personal well-being and the societal well-being. Although previous QOL studies had seldom included perceptions towards various societal conditions to identify life satisfaction in general, our data analysis shows that satisfaction on these conditions do constitute an important component of the global QOL.     

Global QUALITY OF LIFE (QOL), health and ability are primarily determined by our consciousness. Research findings from Denmark 1991–2004

Social Indicators Research - Objective: To explain the global quality of life (QOL) from 2000 indicators representing all aspects of life. Design and setting: Two cross sectional population...     

A DEA Approach to Measure the Quality-of-Life in the Municipalities of the Canary Islands

The notion of the quality of life has always intrigued economists, sociologists and other researchers in the area of social science. Since the genesis of the definition of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a truthful measure of well-being and economic development, other sophisticated methodologies have been proposed in the literature to measure the quality-of-life (QOL) that extend in a multidimensional way this complex concept. Measuring QOL in municipalities consists in finding a set of comparable attributes that can be weighted by some metric in order to construct a synthetic index. Thus, the narrow vision obtained by a single measure as the GDP, in which differences in the QOL cannot be fully analyzed, is overcome. Based upon a refinement of data envelopment analysis (DEA)—the cross-efficiency method, the current paper develops a synthetic QOL index that is based in 19 partial indicators which present the tradeoffs of different dimension for the 87 municipalities of the Canary Islands in Spain. Marginal rates of substitution are calculated to evaluate the tradeoffs on QOL dimensions. A method is also proposed to determine the scores chart of each municipality which can be used as a tool to policy makers in order to establish a program of improving the ranking position of the municipality identifying the critical QOL factors.     

Quality of Life from the Voting Booth: The Effect of Crime Rates and Income on Recent U.S. Presidential Elections

Quality of Life (QOL) is often measured with surveys of citizen’s satisfaction. In contrast, the current research uses already-existing voting data to infer citizens’ perceptions of QOL. Under this model, citizens decide how much their QOL has improved (or declined) since the last election, and then vote to reward (or punish) the incumbent party accordingly. Analysis of the popular vote for the incumbent party then allows inference on how citizens judge their QOL and how they weight the various domains. Previous research has concluded that voters reward an incumbent who improves the economic domain prior to election. I test whether voters also reward declining crime rates, and estimate how citizens weight the relative importance of each in determining QOL. I analyze the vote shares by state from U.S. presidential elections from 1972 to 1996. Results show that changes in crime rates do influence vote share, consistent with the responsibility hypothesis, but to a smaller degree than the economic domain does. The method described provides convergent evidence that citizens weight domains differentially, and can provide the weights for a national QOL index.     

The fallacy of misplaced precision

This article agrees that the plethora of terms and concepts found in the literature on homosexuality is confusing. However, it may be entirely appropriate given the complex and multidimensional nature of the phenomenon under investigation. Numerous examples from the history of other sciences are used to show that conceptual consensus is very slow in coming. In some advanced fields, researchers have learned that reality is best described using cluster concepts and fuzzy sets. This paper introduces the notions of extensive and intensive meanings and gives examples of how the meanings that researchers adopt are dependent on the questions they are studying.     

Spilling the T on Trans-Misogyny and Microaggressions: An Intersectional Oppression and Social Process Among Trans Women

ABSTRACT

Minority stress frameworks seek to explain how stress impacts the health of minorities. Examining the social location of trans women in society is critical to understand the unique forms of oppression that engender stress and microaggression for trans women. This article uses intersectionality to examine the lived experiences of young trans women and develop new theoretical concepts to understand the social process of trans-misogyny. We use grounded theory to analyze semistructured, in-depth interviews conducted with 38 young trans women ages 16–24 in Los Angeles and Chicago. Our findings describe key concepts: trans-misogyny, cis-sexism, the passing complex, and transition work. We describe how trans-misogyny acts as an intersectional, interlocking structure of oppression, fueling the passing complex, and, as a result, how trans women experience overt and covert forms of discrimination.     

Happy life-expectancy

One of the aims of social indicator research is to develop a comprehensive measure of quality-of-life in nations that is analogous to GNP in economic indicator research. For that purpose, several multi dimensional indexes have been proposed. In addition to economic performance, these also acknowledge the nation's success in matters like schooling and social equality. The most current indicator of this type is the ‘Human Development Index’. In this approach QOL is measured by input; the degree to which society provides conditions deemed beneficial (‘presumed’ QOL). The basic problem is that one never knows to what extent the cherished provisions are really good for people. An alternative is measuring QOL in nations by output, and consider how well people actually flourish in the country. This ‘apparent’ QOL can be measured by the degree to which citizens live long and happily. This conception is operationalized by combining registration based estimates of length-of-life, with survey data on subjective appreciation-of-life. Life-expectancy in years is multiplied by average happiness on a 0–1 scale. The product is named ‘Happy Life-Expectancy’ (HLE), and can be interpreted as the number of years the average citizen in a country lives happily at a certain time. HLE was assessed in 48 nations in the early 1990's. It appears to be highest in North-West European nations (about 60) and lowest in Africa (below 35). HLE scores are systematically higher in nations that are most affluent, free, educated, and tolerant. Together, these country-characteristics explain 70% of the statistical variance in HLE. Yet HLE is not significantly related to unemployment, state welfare and income equality, nor to religiousness and trust in institutions. HLE does not differ either with military dominance and population pressure. The conclusion is that HLE qualifies as the envisioned comprehensive social indicator. It has both clear substantive meaning (happy life-years) and theoretical significance (ultimate output measure). HLE differentiates well. Its correlations fit most assumptions about required input, but also challenge some. The indicator is likely to have political appeal.     

Toward a comprehensive ‘quality-of-life’ index

Any attempt to construct an overall measure of the quality-of-life (“QOL”) of a community, population group, or larger society must inevitably confront the critical obstacle posed by the absence of a common numéraire. The diverse elements that significantly affect the “QOL” of individuals and social groups are each subject, at least in principle, to some form of measurement, but no satisfactory method has yet been devised whereby these different measurements could be reduced to a single metric.The construct that is developed in this paper cannot claim to have overcome this fundamental problem; nor does it settle the equally basic difficulties relating to what specific indicators to include in the composite construct, and how to weigh their individual values. However, it illustrates one possible approach toward the development of a summary index value that provides some insight into both direction (“favorable” or “unfavorable”) and magnitude of observed year-to-year changes in a selected number of fairly representative socioeconomic indicators for which measures were available for the United States annually from 1969 to the present. The information provided by this index lacks explanatory power, but examination of the components of the observed changes in the index does yield some useful insight into the relative contribution of changes in different “areas of concern” to the overall changes observed in the “QOL” in the United States during the 1969–1985 period.     

Empirical indicators of educational equity and equality: A thai case study

The focus of this paper is social indicator reporting, not the development of scientific generalization. This social indicator analysis involves the development of an extensive set of empirical indicators to show the extent of equity and equality of education. Equity and equality are viewed as distinct concepts, each with its own indicators. The set of indicators proposed is applied to Thailand in a case study. Examples of indicators used are (1) the relationship between socioeconomic background and access to preschool education, (2) the relationship between provincial wealth and opportunities for upper primary education, (3) proportion of females in lower primary schools, and (4) degree of equality among provinces in grant per pupil in primary education. The discrepancy ratio is introduced as an indicator to standardize measures of inequality and inequity. This set of indicators shows moderate levels of inequality and inequity in Thailand, with the most serious problems at the preschool, secondary, and higher education levels. Empirical indicators of this type are viewed as critically necessary for governments everywhere to enable them to chart their progress toward greater equity and equality.     

Using Child and Family Indicators to Influence Communities and Policy in Los Angeles County

This article presents a case study on the use of social indicators to guide community action and influence policy decisions around children and families in Los Angeles County California. Since the early 1990s, the Children's Planning Council has incorporated strategic use of data in all of its planning and community organizing. The Council has developed a unique set of strategies for using social indicators, in combination with large-scale organizing, to convene stakeholders, change perceptions and influence decison-making. The article describes the Council, the theoretical framework that guides its approach to data, key issues that have guided its information strategies, and the challenges that still lie ahead.     

Measuring Women’s Empowerment: A Critical Review of Current Practices and Recommendations for Researchers

Women’s empowerment is an intrinsic human rights goal that has implications for the health and well-being of women and their children. Poor measurement hampers current research efforts, and improving empowerment measurement is a frequently identified research priority. However, a discussion of specific steps researchers can take to improve upon common measurement practices is lacking. The purpose of this paper is to provide quantitative researchers recommendations to measure women’s empowerment in a theory-based, precise, and comprehensive way. This paper reviewed key theoretical concepts of women’s empowerment and critically reviewed common measurement approaches. Three broad recommendations for measuring empowerment emerged from this critical review, and specific suggestions to meet these recommendations are discussed. First, researchers should draw upon theory to construct measurement models (e.g., using theory to construct dimensions of empowerment and selection of indicators). Second, researchers should use analytic methods that minimize implicit judgments and bias (e.g., not classifying women as empowered using specific criteria). Third, researchers should collect comprehensive empowerment information (e.g., supplementing quantitative measures with qualitative interviews to learn how and why changes took place). Measuring empowerment poses a number of challenges, and this review provides researchers suggestions to improve upon common measurement practices. Improved measurement will strengthen research efforts on the causes and consequences of poor empowerment, which has the potential to improve the well-being of women and their children.