Quality of life

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Quality of life is the degree of well-being felt by an individual or group of people.

Unlike standard of living, quality of life is not a tangible thing, and so cannot be measured directly. It consists of two components: physical and psychological. The physical aspect includes things such as health, diet, and protection against pain and disease. The psychological aspect includes stress, worry, pleasure and other positive or negative emotional states. It is virtually impossible to predict the quality of life of a specific individual, since the combination of attributes that leads one individual to be content is rarely the same for another individual. However, one can assume with some confidence that the higher averagecitation needed level of diet, shelter, safety, as well as freedoms and rights a general population has, the better overall quality of life it experiences. In order to attain even a minimum level quality of life an individual must acquire basic needs in order to survive. Basic needs include food, shelter and protection from serious disease. An individual's quality of life will increase depending on the degree to which that individual acquires his or her wants. These wants are unique to each individual and can include physical possessions such as cars, books, snack food and souvenirs, as well as psychological wants such as peace and quiet or group interaction.

Understanding quality of life is today particularly important in health care, where monetary measures do not readily apply. Decisions on what research or treatments to invest the most in are closely related to their effect on a patient's quality of life.

Organisational well-being looks at related factors from a corporate perspective, although this agenda is also informed by the employers' duty-of-care and external drivers such as the UK Health and Safety Executive's Management Standards for Stress (http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/index.htm). Organisational wellbeing looks at well-being issues that affect a company's staff and manages them to drive change and improve performance.

Contents

Measuring health-related quality of life (HRQoL)

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Another method of measuring differences in quality of life is as a difference in the "standard of living", according to the technical definition of that term. For example, people in rural areas and small towns are generally reluctant to move to cities, even if it would mean a substantial increase in their standard of living. Thus the quality of life of living in a rural area is of enough value to offset a higher standard of living. Similarly, people must be paid more to accept jobs that would lower their quality of life. Night jobs or ones with extensive travel all pay more, and the difference in salaries can also give a measure of the value of quality of life.

There is a growing field of research concerned with developing, evaluating and applying quality of life measures within health related research (e.g. within randomized controlled trials), especially Health Services Research. Many of these focus on the measurement of health related quality of life (HRQoL), rather than a more global conceptualisation of quality of life. They also focus on measuring HRQoL from the perspective of the patient and thus take the form of self completed questionnaires. The International Society for Quality of Life was founded in response to this research and is a useful source of information on this topic.

A number of groups and agencies around the world have tried to develop ways of assessing quality of life - see the external links.

Application in politics

North America

The term has often been used, since the 1980s and especially 1990s, in connection with the presence or absence of so-called victimless crimes, its users in this sense citing the incidence of these to gauge the inherent level of disorder in a society at a particular time. Users of the term in this application — who tend to be political and/or social conservatives — often refer to victimless crimes by the alternate name of "quality-of-life crimes." In conjunction with this, American sociologist James Q. Wilson has articulated what he calls the Broken Window Theory, which asserts that relatively minor problems left unattended (such as public urination by homeless individuals, open alcohol containers and public alcohol consumption) send a subliminal message that disorder in general is being tolerated, and as a result, more serious crimes will end up being committed (the analogy being that a broken window left unrepaired shows an image of general dilapidation). Wilson's theories have been expounded by many prominent American mayors, most notably Oscar Goodman in Las Vegas, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Rudolph Giuliani (seen as its instigator) in New York City and Gavin Newsom in San Francisco. Their cities have instituted so-called zero tolerance policies, i.e., that do not tolerate even minor crimes.

One attempt to take quality of life more into account in government decisions is the notion of a seventh generation standard, which argues that the effect of any decision today should be judged by its effect in six generations. These measures are often associated in the United States with the proposed Seventh Generation Amendment proposal to the US Constitution, and in Canada with the Canada Well-Being Measurement Act co-authored by Mike Nickerson of the Green Party of Ontario and Joe Jordan, a former Liberal Party of Canada Member of Parliament. This strategy still would be very difficult to implement, as predicting the future is difficult. Decision makers seven generations ago in the early mid-19th century would have great difficulty comprehending today's realities.

Several first nations in Canada and US seem to have independently originated this standard, prior to European contact, which seems to represent the age ratio between the longest-lived elders and newborns expressed in terms of generations, i.e., humans live at most 100-115 years, and reproduce in most tribal cultures at about 15-17 years old, a ratio of about seven to one. So, according to the standard, any child born as a decision was being made would be able to assess its impact over their entire life as an elder. Another interpretation would be that seven generations is beyond the lifespan of any individual, in effect ensuring that the results of decisions will occur in absentia. Thus, the choices for a decision should be made in consideration of persons that will never be met. In this way, the chooser and the resultants are equally anonymous to each other, removing any personal bias from the decision-making process.

Although laws to require standards for measuring well-being have not yet been adopted, they are growing in popularity in the labor movement, forced attention to these matters to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) level and have begun to challenge assumptions of economics regarding inflation and money supply.

Early studies by JCMOPS In Dt 365 found that adopting the US dollar (i.e., in both Canada and Mexico) have been drastically complicated by proposals to agree, as a prerequisite, on measuring well-being, which is still a very new subject. In part to stall or block currency union, the Canadian Labour Congress, Green Party of the United States, Green Party of Ontario and Green Party of Canada have all backed well-being measures very strongly. However, there is broad agreement among green economists that a common standard for measuring well-being, and possibly also Bioregional Democracy measures, would be required to ensure biosecurity after a currency union.

Cultural references

An independent American film entitled Quality of Life offers a fictionalized story of two young graffiti writers caught up in the harsh anti-graffiti crackdown under San Francisco's "quality-of-life laws".

See also

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