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.     

Medical director musical chairs. A reaffirmation of my career in medical management

Losing your job can be a traumatic event. But you can minimize the shock by taking some action steps to find another job quickly--in many cases, even a better job. Consider some advice from a seasoned physician executive who has successfully negotiated the corporate maze found in many health care organizations today.     

Volunteer work and well-being

Using two waves of panel data from Americans' Changing Lives (House 1995) (N = 2,681), we examine the relationships between volunteer work in the community and six aspects of personal well-being: happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem, sense of control over life, physical health, and depression. Prior research has more often examined the effects of voluntary memberships than of volunteer work, has used cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data, and, when longitudinal, has emphasized social causation over selection effects. Focusing only on the consequences of volunteer work overlooks the antecedents of human agency. People with greater personality resources and better physical and mental health should be more likely to seek (or to be sought for) community service. Hence, we examine both selection and social causation effects. Results show that volunteer work indeed enhances all six aspects of well-being and, conversely, people who have greater well-being invest more hours in volunteer service. Given this, further understanding of self- versus social-selection processes seems an important next step. Do positive, healthy people actively seek out volunteer opportunities, or do organizations actively recruit individuals of these types (or both)? Explaining how positive consequences flow from volunteer service may offer a useful counterpoint to stress theory, which has focused primarily on negative life experiences and their sequelae.     

The impact of childhood abuse and neglect on adult mental health: a prospective study

This paper examines the impact of three types of victimization in childhood--sexual abuse, physical abuse, and neglect--on lifetime measures of mental health among adults. In contrast to research that relies on retrospective recall of childhood victimization, this work uses a prospective sample gathered from records of documented court cases of childhood abuse and neglect in a midwestern city around 1970. These subjects were interviewed about twenty years later. In addition, this research compares outcomes of the 641 members of the abuse and neglect group with a matched control group of 510 persons who did not have documented cases of abuse or neglect. The results indicate that men who were abused and neglected as children have more dysthymia and antisocial personality disorder as adults than matched controls, but they did not have more alcohol problems. Abused and neglected women report more symptoms of dysthymia, antisocial personality disorder, and alcohol problems than controls. After controlling for stressful life events, however, childhood victimization had little direct impact on any lifetime mental health outcome. This research indicates the importance of adopting an approach that places childhood victimization in the context of other life stressors and of prospective changes over the life course.     

Evidence-based medicine, clinical uncertainty, and learning to doctor

For the past two decades, evidence-based medicine (EBM), or the reliance on current scientific evidence to reach medical decisions, has been embraced as a new paradigm to standardize clinical care. Drawing from in-depth interviews with seventeen pediatric residents in two residency programs, we evaluate the extent to which the medical sociology scholarship on uncertainty analytically elucidates the recent influx of EBM during residency training. Our findings suggest that residents interpret EBM in varying ways to match their work practices: "Librarians" consult the literature while "researchers" evaluate it critically. For both groups, EBM might generate new uncertainties due to the increased reliance on information technologies and epidemiology. Whether EBM reduces uncertainty depends upon the residents' understanding of standardized knowledge and consequent incorporation of EBM in their clinical practice. Contrary to the predictions of some sociologists, EBM does not lead to a diminishment of humanitarian values in medical care. Nor does EBM lead to a science-based meritocracy on the patient ward, as claimed by some EBM advocates. Our conceptual updating of uncertainty emphasizes the continuous management of uncertainty during the medical socialization process. We argue that managing uncertainty develops along with what we term evidence-based clinical judgment.