Sociological Quality of Life

Very often when we are attempting to assess the extent of a difficult to measure attribute such as quality of life, we look to surrogate attributes that are more easily measurable. It is very difficult to detemine the quality of life for an individual because we do not have a handy quality of life meter that we can use in the same way as we could use a thermometer to measure their temperature or a tape measure to determine their height. What we do instead is that we measure other attributes that we feel are correlated with quality of life.

We often see list of states or cities with the best quality of life. What does this mean? Does it mean that the people in these states or cities go through their days kvelling in ecstasy? If you were to move to one of these cities or states would you reel in the delight of increased quality of life? Are there no miserable people in these places?

Actually, what happens is that the people who determine quality of life for states or cities do it by measuring surrogate variables such as days of sunshine, average temperature, air quality, commute time, and so on. The presumption is that if these variables are agreeable then your quality of life will be improved. This is not entirely unfounded as having these variables at disagreeable levels might well detract from one's quality of life. But, they do not get directly at the underlying phenomenon. One could not say that quality of life means good climate, clean water and a short commute. While quality of life might be affect by these variables, it is somethig very different from them.

This approach to quality of life is often refered to as sociological quality of life as it looks to aggregate sociological variables to assess a personal subjective phenomenon. And while it is not without merit, it does fail to directly address the underlying phenomenon. That is, one's life has quality if one feels like it has quality. Quality of life is a subjective psychological experience that has little to do with these surrogate variables. And that will be the topic of the next post.