Internet Communication Versus Face-to-face Interaction in Quality of Life

This study seeks to understand the role of the Internet in quality of life (QoL). Specifically, it examines the question of whether Internet communication serves, like face-to-face interactions, to enhance quality of life. It is hypothesized that the use of the Internet for interpersonal communication can improve quality of life among Internet users, just like face-to-face communication in everyday life. Sample survey data were collected in four Chinese cities, namely Hong Kong, Taipei, Beijing, and Wuhan, to serve as replicates to test the hypothesis. The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) of Diener (1984) was used to measure quality of life in the four cities. It was found that contrary to our expectation, Internet communication cannot predict quality of life while face-to-face communication with friends and family members can. The result was the same across the four Chinese cities. Possible reasons for this finding are examined and discussed.     

Community Assessment of the Effects of Casinos on Quality of Life

Social Indicators Research - Recent attention has focused upon the socialand economic impact of legalized gambling,particularly casino gambling. Thoughconsiderable attention has been paid to...     

Internet Service Cognition and Use,and Their Promotion of Quality of Life in Taiwan

The “e-Taiwan Program” implemented by Taiwan government is aimed at showing the e-advantage in people’s life and bring about essential benefits. This research follows the e-Life indicators of the Quality of Life measurement system developed by “e-Taiwan Program”, which including four major dimensions of e-Daily Life, e-Business, e-Government, Broadband to home. By using telephone interview, 3,024 respondents aged 15 and above were validly interviewed. In Taiwan, the cognition of e-Life service is high, and 71.4% of e-Life services have been well heard of by residents. Although the penetration of e-Life services is not as high as the degree of cognition; there are 31.3% of the e-Life services promoted by “e-Taiwan Program” has been used. The average score of overall quality of life promotion of e-Life is 63.9. It represents that, in general, people think their life has been slightly improved by e-Life services. Through stepwise regression analysis models, we found that most of Internet services usages will bring highly positive influence on the quality of life promotion, but the cognition and usage in e-Government usually bring negative influence on the quality of promotion.     

Examining the Effects of Perceptions of Community and Recreation Participation on Quality of Life

The study of quality of life remains a key area of interest for not only researchers but to society. Through research being completed in multiple disclines and from a multitude of perspectives, the need to understand the full breadth of quality of life is required in order for the further development of this research area. Through building on previous research completed on quality of life from multiple disclines, this study utilizes numerous objective and subjective indicators to model quality of life in a community in the southwest United States. Through the analysis of 352 completed surveys, it was found that the two strongest predictors of quality of life were community pride and community elements. Of interest is that a number of other indicators including recreation participation and length of residency in a community were found to have a negative relationship with quality of life.     

The Effects of Quality of Life on National Elections: A Multi-Country Analysis

This paper studies the effects of several Quality ofLife (QOL) indicators on the outcomes of nationalelections. We test the hypothesis that declines innational QOL will have a negative effect on the votingsupport for the governing party in the next election. For each election since 1960 in thirteen countries, weuse objective measures of QOL for the previous year toestimate the voting function by using astate-of-the-art technique called Sliced InverseRegression (Li, 1991). These objective measuresinclude GDP per capita, food availability, inflation,crime rates, divorce rate, and percent of females inthe labor force, among others. The estimated votingfunction is the best predictor of voters' behavior asa function of the changes in QOL.The results show that changes in economic variablesand food availability significantly affect electionoutcomes. In addition, changes in crime rates werefound to be nearly as important as economic variablesin influencing the election outcomes. This marks thefirst time that a non-economic indicator has beenshown to affect elections. In contrast, measures ofsatisfaction with family life, such as divorce, infantmortality, and percent females in the workforce, showno effect on voting behavior, probably because votersdo not hold their governments responsible for familyaffairs.     

Materialism and Quality of Life

An attempt is made in this paper to establish a foundation for a theory of materialism and quality of life. The theory posits that overall life satisfaction (quality of life) is partly determined by satisfaction with standard of living. Satisfaction with standard of living, in turn, is determined by evaluations of one's actual standard of living compared to a set goal. Materialists experience greater dissatisfaction with their standard of living than nonmaterialists, which in turn spills over to overall life causing dissatisfaction with life in general. Materialists experience dissatisfaction with their standard of living because they set standard of living goals that are inflated and unrealistically high. These goals set by materialists are more influenced by affective-based expectations (such as ideal, deserved, and need-based expectations) than cognitive-based ones (such as predictive, past, and ability based expectations). Materialists' ideal standard-of-living expectations are influenced by social comparisons involving remote referents, more so than comparisons involving standards that are situationally imposed. Examples of situationally-imposed standards are perceptions of wealth, income, and material possessions of family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and so on. In contrast, examples of standards based on remote sources are perceptions of standard of living of others in one's community, town, state, country, other countries; perceptions of standard of living of others based on gender, age, education, ethnicity, occupation, and social class. This tendency to use remote referents in social comparisons may account for materialists' inflated and value-laden expectations of their standard of living. Materialists' deserved standard-of-living expectations are influenced by the tendency to engage in equity comparisons involving income and work. Thus, materialists compare themselves with others that seem to have more income and worked no harder. These equity comparisons generate feelings of inequity, injustice, anger, or envy. These emotions may also account for materialists' inflated and value-laden expectations of their standard of living. Materialists' standard-of-living expectations based on minimum needs are influenced by the tendency to spend more than generate income. This proclivity to overconsume and underproduce may be partly responsible for materialists' inflated and value-laden expectations of their standard of living.     

Sharing Mechanisms for Information Technology in Developing Countries,Social Capital and Quality of Life

For the majority of those living in developing countries (especially in the rural areas) sharing may be the only means of obtaining access to IT. Oddly, however, no-one has viewed ‘IT for development’ specifically from this point of view for the Internet, computers and mobile phones. A good beginning, it seems to me, is to make an analytical classification of existing sharing mechanisms so that they can be compared and contrasted. In so doing I rely partly on the relationship between information technology, social capital and quality of life in developing countries.     

A Note on Student Quality of Life

An aggregated sample of students (n = 3407) from the University of Northern British Columbia covering 7 of the 8 years from 1998 to 2005 is analyzed to show the relative and combined explanatory power of some life domain (e.g., satisfaction with family relations) and university-related variables (e.g., satisfaction with UNBC instructors) on some global quality-of-life variables (e.g., life satisfaction). It was found that, in combination with the life domain variables, the university-related variables added practically nothing to our explanatory power. The most powerful university-related variable was students’ satisfaction with their instructors.     

Measuring Quality of Life

This paper considers quality of life (QOL) to be a global, yet unidimensional, subjective assessment of one's satisfaction with life. This conceptualization is consistent with viewing QOL assessments as resulting from the interaction of multiple causal dimensions, but it is inconsistent with proposals to limit QOL to health-related quality of life (HRQOL). We test the unidimensional yet global conceptualization of QOL using data from coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) patients. The Self-Anchoring Striving Scale (SASS) and four other indicators derived from the literature, all seemed to function as indicators of a single concept (QOL) that was repeatedly drawn upon as the patients determined their responses to these indicators. However, only about half the variance in each indicator was attributable to that common QOL source. Several structural equation models are used to assess whether the superior performance of the Life 3 indicator is an artifact of the repetition of an item within this indicator. The data convincingly indicate that the superior performance is not a memory artifact, and that even the repetition of an identically worded item prodded the patients into drawing yet again upon the same QOL factor that grounded all the other measures.     

Italian Quality of Life

The paper begins with a presentation of the quality of life in Italy as compared to other countries in the European Union. Several of the major socio-demographic and economic and life satisfaction (as revealed by the Eurobarometer survey) indicators are considered. Then, the Italian situation is discussed at greater length in the light of the transformations it has undergone in the past ten years. Thus it is possible to evaluate the following demographic themes: the profound process of aging; transformations in the family; and transformations in urban areas. The following economic themes are considered: the principal characteristics of the marketplace, in particular, the problem of unemployment; and household income and consumption. Finally, the time series of certain objective indicators are placed alongside those of life satisfaction.     

Health and the Quality of Life

The aim of this investigation was to explain theimpact of peoples self-reported health on theirlevels of satisfaction with their health, and theimpact of these things plus satisfaction with otherspecific domains of their lives on the perceivedquality of their lives. The latter was operationalized as general happiness, satisfactionwith life as a whole and overall satisfaction with thequality of life. Seven hundred and twenty-three (723)usable questionnaires returned from a mailout randomsample of 2500 households of Prince George, BritishColumbia in November 1998 formed the working data-setfor our analyses. Among other things, mean respondentscores on the SF-36 health profile were found to belower than published norms from the UK, USA,Netherlands and Sweden, but higher than scores fromAberdeen, Scotland. Mean scores on the CES-Ddepression scale also indicated that our respondentstended to have more depressive symptoms thancomparison groups in Winnipeg and the USA. A review oftrends in mean scores on 17 quality of life items(e.g., satisfaction with family life, financialsecurity, recreation, etc.) from 1994, 1997 and 1998revealed that there were only 7 statisticallysignificant changes across the four year period andthey were all negative. Multivariate regressionanalysis showed that health status measured with avariety of indicators could explain 56% of thevariation in respondents reported satisfaction withtheir health. A combination of health status plusdomain satisfaction indicators could explain 53% ofthe variation in respondents reported happiness, 68%of reported life satisfaction and 63% of reportedsatisfaction with the overall quality of life. Sixtypercent of the explained variation in happiness scoreswas attributable to self-reported health scores, whileonly 18% of the explained variation in satisfactionwith life and with the overall quality of life scoreswas attributable self-reported health scores.     

Family Life Quality and Emotional Quality of Life in Chinese Adolescents with and Without Economic Disadvantage

Chinese secondary school students (N = 2758) responded to measures of perceived family life quality (parenting quality and parent–child relational quality) and emotional quality of life (hopelessness, mastery, life satisfaction and self-esteem). Parenting quality included different aspects of parental behavioral control (parental knowledge, expectation, monitoring, discipline and demandingness as well as parental control defined in terms of indigenous Chinese concepts), parental psychological control, and parental responsiveness whereas parent–child relational quality included satisfaction with parental control, child’s readiness to communicate with the parents, parental trust of the child, and child’s trust of the parent. Results showed that parenting quality and parent–child relational quality in poor families were generally poorer than those of non-poor families and the differences were more pronounced in paternal parenting quality and father–child relational quality than in maternal parenting quality and mother–child relational quality. Emotional quality of life of adolescents experiencing economic disadvantage was also found to be poorer than that of adolescents not experiencing economic disadvantage. The present findings replicate the previous research findings in the literature and generate a pioneering dataset based on Chinese adolescents at Secondary 2 level in Hong Kong.     

Impact of Individual and Organizational Variables on Quality of Life

The general goal of this study consists of analyzing the influence of different types of human services in the quality of life of their nested users. Several multilevel models were proposed to test for significant differences not only in the overall quality of life score, but also in each of the eight core domains. Participants included 11,624 users of social and human services and the assessment quality of life instrument was the GENCAT Scale. Variables that were studied in the different models were gender, age, and diagnostic group (elderly, intellectual disability, physical disability, mental health problems, and chemical dependency) at the individual user level (level 1: individual), while type of services—in terms of the main population addressed by their supports (i.e. the aforementioned groups)—was studied at service level (level 2: organizational). In order to explain differences, individual characteristics were introduced first, types of services were introduced next, and finally joint individual and service variables were introduced in a single model. The main results of this study were that personal and organizational variables exhibited a different level of influence on users’ quality of life; and also that the type of services significantly influenced the quality of life of its users. The results of this study lead to practical implications for services providing support to these diagnostic groups, especially for those interested in managing, assessing, and improving quality of life related personal outcomes at the user level as well as quality enhancement at the organizational level.     

Quality of Life Across Life Domains: Family Structure and Relations

Social Indicators Research - This paper aims to evaluate how the Korean family fares in terms of itsquality of life. Specifically, it examines the perceived quality of relationships among family...     

城市老年人生活质量分析

本文运用2000年辽宁城市老年人口抽样调查数据,对各类型城市老年人生活质量的主要影响因素进行了分析,指出一部分老年人已构成城市贫困群体和弱势群体,离退休金是保障城市老年人生活质量的最重要因素,文化素质和身体素质是对城市老年人生活质量产生负向影响的主要因素。     

Multidimensional Quality of Life: A New Measure of Quality of Life in Adults

This paper presents a new measure for assessing quality of life (QOL) –the Multidimensional Quality of Life (MQOL)– and describes its derivation, characteristics, structure and several applications. Reasons for developing the MQOL include the restricted range of assessed domains and the heavy emphasis on health in many standard assessment tools. The MQOL was derived by meaning probes into QOL in different samples. It is a 60-item self-report tool of high reliability and validity covering various themes and forming, in line with factor and cluster analyses, 17 scales that constitute five factors according to confirmatory factor analysis. It has been applied with thousands of individuals, in English, Hebrew, Russian and Arabic, and is adequate for healthy and physically or mentally sick individuals, under regular or challenging circumstances. Described studies present findings in samples of sick or healthy individuals (e.g., unemployed, members of a collapsing Kibbutz); relations between the MQOL and coping strategies in partners of sick individuals; and interrelations of overall and scale scores in new and old immigrants. Conclusions focus on the structure of the MQOL, the specificity of coping effects, and the stabilizing mechanisms of QOL.     

Adding Life to Years: The Influence of Internet Use and Appearance Management on Life Satisfaction Among the Elderly

Social Indicators Research - With the rapid increase in the aged population, life satisfaction among old people has become a hot topic for both discussion and research. However, the antecedents of...     

Life Quality measures of smoking

The cost of smoking has three principal dimensions: money, reduced life expectancy, and diminished health. Each component can be quantified; all have an influence on the quality and duration of life. The combined influence can be evaluated using an aggregated social indicator, such as the Life Quality Index. It can be expressed in various ways, e.g. as an equivalent move to a nation or to a time with a lower level of the LQI, as an equivalent economic loss, or as an equivalent loss of life expectancy. To illustrate, the analysis is applied to Danish data on smoking; the cost for a typical pack-a-day habit is equivalent to a 57% reduction in personal income, 8.6 years loss of life expectancy, or a 4% drop in the Life Quality Index. These measures underscore the seriousness of smoking as a health hazard.     

Criminal Victimization and the Quality of Life

The aim of this investigation was to explain theimpact of crime-related issues on satisfaction withthe quality of life, satisfaction with life as a wholeand happiness in the city of Prince George, BritishColumbia. As explanatory variables, we had measures ofrespondent fears of and actual cases of victimization, Indexes of Neighbourhood Problems, PolicePerformance, Neighbourhood Worries, DefensiveBehaviour, beliefs about increases in local crime,satisfaction with personal and family safety, andsatisfaction with a variety of domains of life (e.g.,friendships, financial security, health). Collectivelysuch variables could explain only 5% of the variationin happiness scores, 7% of the variation in lifesatisfaction scores and 9% of the variation insatisfaction with the quality of life scores. However,they could explain 38% of the variation in overallneighbourhood satisfaction scores. When measures ofsatisfaction with family life, health, self-esteem,etc. were added, we found that crime related issueswere simply displaced by the other measures and thatwe could explain 31% of the variation in overallhappiness scores, 58% of the variation in lifesatisfaction scores and 59% of the variation insatisfaction with the overall quality of life scores. We conclude, therefore, that crime-related issues haverelatively little impact on peoples satisfaction withthe quality of their lives, with life satisfaction orhappiness here.     

Public Services and the Quality of Life

This is a report of the results of a survey of citizen beliefs and attitudes about public services and the quality of life in Prince George, British Columbia, Canada in the summer of 1997. Information is provided about the perceived frequency with which various services were used, the perceived satisfaction and value for tax dollars spent on the services as well as on levels of government officials generally, preferences for the provision of more or fewer services and for spending relatively more or less revenue on different services, views about user-fees, and views about smoke-free public places and the likely impact of bylaw changes on people's behaviour. Using such information, we examined correlations among perceived satisfaction, perceived value for money, use, spending preferences and demand, and, using multiple regression analysis, explained 66% of the variance in life satisfaction scores, 57% of the variance in satisfaction with the quality of life scores and 37% of the variance in happiness scores. Applying LISREL 8.14, it was shown that a model in which our three global indicators were explained by 13 domain indicators was superior to a model in which the latter indicators were explained by the former, i.e., a Bottom-Up model was superior to a Top-Down model. A simple linear model was also used to explain 32%, 20% and 19%, respectively, of the variance in satisfaction with municipal, provincial and federal government officials.