Subjective Indicators of the Quality of Life or Wellbeing

1. Subjective Indicators of the Quality of Life or Wellbeing Alex C. Michalos University of Northern British Columbia July 2009

2. . Social indicators are statistics that are supposed to have some significance for measuring the quality of life or overall human wellbeing.

3. The word ‘quality’ has a descriptive sense meaning sort, type or kind, and an evaluative sense meaning good or bad. • So, e.g., one might describe attendees to a football game by giving their quantity (10,000) and their qualities in a descriptive sense as male or female, and in an evaluative sense as properly behaved or hooligans.

4. Since the 1960s social indicators researchers have drawn a distinction between subjective and objective indicators.

5. Subjective social indicators are statistics that have some significance for measuring the quality of life from the point of view of some particular subject(s). • Objective social indicators are statistics that have some significance for measuring the quality of life from the point of view of any independent observer.

6. Examples Descriptive Subjective indicator: # of self-reported voters Evaluative Subjective indicator: % of self-reported people in good health Descriptive Objective indicator: # of ballots counted (in principle) Evaluative Objective indicator: murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants

7. Very often, but not always, subjective indicators measure things that are relatively intangible and directly experienced; e.g., • generic feelings of positive or negative affect • specific feelings of fear, joy, contentment • attitudes of racism and sexism, • beliefs in progress or democratic process, • knowledge of natural science or current events

8. personal standards for evaluation like equity or beauty • motives or goals like vengeance or the pursuit of wealth • needs for friendship or social esteem • wants for luxury or unusual items • personal assessments of one’s own happiness, satisfaction, overall wellbeing or quality of life

9. Researchers do not have direct, sensible access to other people’s felt affect, attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, motives, values, evaluation standards, needs, wants and personal assessments of happiness, satisfaction, overall wellbeing or quality of life, although it is precisely such attributes that supremely characterize our species.

10. Therefore, any attempt to measure human progress or the progress of human societies without measuring these most distinctively human attributes with subjective indicators is bound to be inadequate.

11. For some features of the quality of life it is reasonable to give special privilege to subjective indicators, e.g., • Self-reports of satisfaction with some consumer products, living partner, friends, own life. For some features it is unreasonable, e.g., • Self-reports of others’ motives, feelings and rights, of own diseases and causes, of claims to knowledge.

12. Granting special privilege to personal reports is not granting absolute infallibility. Plato was right when he observed that people do not always know what is in their best interest. Nor do they always know what is true or false about many features of the world. So, we will always need objective indicators, good science and good judgment.

13. What then should we measure or, as Giovannini suggested, what subjective measures of wellbeing merit our consideration as candidates for inclusion in a comprehensive set of important measures of individual and/or social progress?

14. There are many well-known and well-tested measures whose psychometric properties are familiar to most of us; e.g., • measures of life satisfaction beginning with Andrews and Withey’s delightful-terrible scale and it’s many variations, • measures of happiness beginning with Gallup’s short item and it’s lengthier variations • Standardized tests of knowledge, e.g., PISA

15. Multi-item indexes usually give us greater sensitivity and stability, but most of us use single-item measures as well and sometimes these measures perform better than well-known multi-item indexes. I strongly recommend that we always use both kinds of measures, especially for our most visible and important dependent variables.

16. While I believe a good case can be made for trying to craft and use a comprehensive composite index of the quality of life of individuals and communities, I do not believe that good public policy making in the interests of societal progress can be based on any single measure. We will always need many subjective and objective measures, skillfully crafted and employed.

17. Rather than trying to address Giovannini’s question one step at a time, measure by measure, I would like to put on the table the 2005-06 World Values Survey, which has about 260 items, including many of the usual suspects. I make this proposal not because I think we can actually review these items here but because the WVS items have been accepted by many scholars and one of our aims is to reach some consensus around an acceptable set.

18. In my view the set of items in the WVS has some major omissions, but it is the most comprehensive set I know. Major omissions include items or enough items on: • Arts an arts-related activities • Evaluative comparison standards • Mood and affect measures

19. Health-related measures • Personal safety measures • Time use and time stress measures • Wellbeing indexes The WVS also has some items with less than adequate response categories of various kinds, but we need not discuss those here.

20. Final words of advice When the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was asked what are the 3 most important things to have on an expedition to the Antarctic, he said dogs, dogs and still more dogs. The 3 most important things to have when one searches for acceptable social indicators are patience, patience and still more patience.