Essays on the Quality of Life

493 Pages·2003·8.19 MB·English

by  Alex C. Michalos (auth.)

ESSAYS ON THE QUALITY OF LIFE
Essays on the
Quality of Life
by
ALEX C. MICHALOS
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
A c.l.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-6304-5 ISBN 978-94-017-0389-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-0389-5
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
@ 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2003.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 2003
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface Vll
Acknow ledgments Xl
l. Reflections on twenty-five years of quality-of-life research
2. Combining social, economic and environmental indicators to measure
sustainable human well-being 5
3. Evaluation of equality policies for the status of women in Canada 35
4. Militarism and the quality of life 63
5. Migration and the quality of life 89
6. Job satisfaction, marital satisfaction and the quality of life 123
7. Discrepancies between perceived income needs and actual incomes 145
8. Optimism in 30 countries over a decade 149
9. Health and the quality of life (with Bruno D. Zumbo and Anita Hubley) 153
10. Health and other aspects of the quality of life of older people (with
Anita Hubley, Bruno D. Zumbo and Dawn Hemingway) 183
11. Healthy days, health satisfaction and satisfaction with the overall
quality of life (with Bruno D. Zumbo) 207
12. Leisure activities, health and the quality oflife (with Bruno D. Zumbo) 217
13. Social indicators research and health-related quality of life research 239
14. Public services and the quality of life (with Bruno D. Zumbo) 273
15. Criminal victimization and the quality of life (with Bruno D. Zumbo) 297
16. Policing services and the quality of life 333
v
VI TABLE OF CONTENTS
17. Feminism and the quality of life (with Deborah C. Poff) 345
18. Ethnicity, modern prejudice and the quality of life (with Bruno D.
Zumbo) 367
19. The impact of trust on business, international security and the quality
of life 391
20. Multiple discrepancies theory (MDT) 417
Index 473
PREFACE
When I first thought of assembling this collection of essays on social indicators
of the quality of life, I thought I should begin with my first publication directly
on the subject in 1974 and work my way forward. The collection based on this
strategy included over 800 pages of material on diverse subjects, some of which
were a bit dated. In order to keep the book under 600 pages and to include only
material that might be useful to contemporary researchers working on contempo
rary problems, I simply dropped some of the older material.
Most of the papers in the collection were written in response to invitations to give
talks at conferences or to provide some information to the City Council or
Administrative Services of Prince George, British Columbia. The Institute for Social
Research and Evaluation (lSRE) of the University of Northern British Columbia,
of which I am Director, has a partnership with the City of Prince George and the
Regional Health Board. So, we have undertaken two or three surveys per year
since 1997 working closely with people in these organizations. Anyone interested
in crafting key performance indicators for municipal governments should find
some useful material in many of these papers.
Having decided which papers to include, the question of ordering the papers arose.
I was inclined to some sort of logical rather than historical ordering, but could
not find a tidy logicalorder. Iwanted to lead off with some general, review-type
essays, and the first essay in the collection as it now stands was perfectly suited
for that purpose. However, the second is only a review in the sense that it reviews
problems one faces when one tries to combine social, economic andenvironmental
indicators into one accounting system. I thought that essay should come early because
the problems it addresses will be fairly prominent on the agenda of quality of life
research for the foreseeable future, as they have been for the past 30 years.
The third essay, on the evaluation of the impact of equality policies on the
status of women in Canada, provides a good example of the sort of material and
problems one has to work with if one tries to reach a conclusion about the impact
of those policies that is clear, coherent and comprehensive. The paper does have a
review of the relevant material and the aggregation procedure used is essentially
the same as the one recommended in my 1970 paper on cost-benefit versus expected
utility acceptance mIes for scientific theories.
The paper on militarism and the quality of life (#4) presents a good example
of the medieval strategy of evaluating a thesis by assembling all the arguments
against and for it, and showing that the arguments against it are all defective. The
data employed in the paper are not up to date and some of the arguments have
been rendered obsolete by events (e.g., the end of the Cold War) but, unfortu
nately I suppose, most of the issues and arguments are as important and compelling
today as they were when it was first written.
VB
Vlll PREFACE
The fifth paper, on migration, contains a good overview of work on the main
motives and consequences of within-country residential migration. It does not deal
with migration across national borders, which is more complicated as a result of
diverse immigration policies.
The paper on job satisfaction, marital satisfaction and the quality of life (#6)
was intended to provide an overview of research on those issues and some sug
gestions for future research. The roots of what I later came to call Multiple
Discrepancies Theory (MDT) (essay #20) are revealed in that paper, following
work coming from Angus Campbell, Phil Converse and Willard Rodgers at the
University of Michigan.
The short paper on perceived income needs and actual incomes (#7) merely
examines the differences between these two things over aperiod of years in Canada
and the United States, using national survey research data. That is followed by
another short paper (#8) using Gallup data to consider national mean levels of
reported optimism in thirty countries over a decade.
The paper on health and the quality of life (#9), written with Bruno Zumbo and
Anita Hubley, was our first attempt at gathering some baseline data on health
status (using SF-36) for the city of Prince George and measuring its impact on
so me global (e.g., happiness, life satisfaction) and domain-specific (e.g., satisfac
tion with one's housing, job, family life) quality of life measures. That essay also
contains a fairly extensive review of the work of others addressing similar problems.
Adding Dawn Hemingway to our team, we undertook a survey of older people
in the Northern Interior Health Region of British Columbia (#10) in order to get
baseline data again and to explore relationships between a set of health status and
quality of life indicators.
The paper on healthy days and the quality of life (#11) is a summary paper pre
senting results of several surveys in which Zumbo and I experimented with measures
of population health developed by the US Center for Disease Control. Our primary
aim was to try to assess how the measures would interact and function as predic
tors of global and domain-specific quality of life.
Zumbo and I wrote the paper on leisure activities and health status (#12) based
on a Prince George survey designed to assess the impact of diverse activities on
people's health. It was undertaken for the Department of Leisure Services in our city
and has not been published before.
The paper on social indicators research and health-related quality of life research
(#13) was written for the annual meeting of the International Society for Quality
of Life Research in November 2001. Its aim was to trace some of the history of
the two research traditions devoted to measuring the quality of life, and to try to
create some bridges to encourage greater collaboration and exchanges among the
fairly distinct research communities.
The first survey undertaken in partnership with the City of Prince George and
ISRE was focused on public services and their impact on the quality of life of the
city's residents. This is the fourteenth paper in the current collection, and also written
with Zumbo.
The next two papers were written in collaboration with the Prince George division
PREFACE ix
of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The first (#15, with Zumbo) was based
on a city survey in which we measured the level of criminal victimization in our
city and its impact on residents' perceived quality of life. The second (#16) was
based on a survey undertaken three years later and focused on the evaluation of
policing services and their impact on the quality of life.
The paper on feminism and the quality of life (#17), written with Deborah Poff,
was an attempt to measure the core set of beliefs of members of the Canadian
Research Institute for the Advancement of Women and to see, what, if any, impact
holding those beliefs had on the quality of life.
Zumbo and I tried to measure residents' ethnic backgrounds in various ways,
subtle forms of prejudice and the impact of these things on the quality of life in
the eighteenth essay.
In the paper on trust (#19) I reviewed some recent literature focused on personal,
business and international relations, and tried to show that most people seem to
warrant more trust than most people are prepared to grant.
The first fuB account of MDT and its performance with a sampie of under
graduates completes the coBection (#20). There is quite a bit of theoretical material
reviewed in the paper, but its main aim is to explain the postulates and perfor
mance of the theory. In my four volume Global Report on Student Well-Being I
reported on MDT's performance on a sampie of 18,000 undergraduates in 39
countries.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Most of the papers assembled here first appeared in Social Indicators Research.
So, I am grateful to Kluwer Academic Publishers for letting me reprint them for a
wider audience. I am also grateful to the editor and publisher of Feminist Economics
(http://www.tandf.co.uk).Science for Peace and the Institute for Social Research
at the University of Michigan for permission to publish works originally published
by them, i.e., #1, #4 and #6, respectively. The papers have been reproduced as
they originally appeared in print except for corrections to typos and updating pub
lication information for references to material that was 'in press'. The complete
citation information for each item in the volume is as folIows.
1. "Reflections on twenty-five years of quality-of-life research", Feminist
Economics, 5(2), 1999, pp. 119-123.
2. "Combining social, economic and environmental indicators to measure sus
tainable human well-being", Social Indicators Research, 40, 1997, pp. 221-258.
3. "Evaluation of equality policies for the status of women in Canada", Social
Indicators Research, 49, 2000, pp. 241-277.
4. Militarism and the quality 0/ Life, 1989, Science for Peace/Samuel Stevens,
Toronto.
5. "Migration and the quality of life: A review essay", Social Indicators Research,
39, 1997, pp. 121-166.
6. "Job satisfaction, mari tal satisfaction and the quality of life", Research on the
Quality 0/ Li/e, ed. by Frank M. Andrews, Institute for Social Research,
University of Michigan, 1986, pp. 57-83.
7. "Discrepancies between perceived income needs and actual incomes", Social
Indicators Research, 21, 1989, pp. 293-296.
8. "Optimism in 30 countries over a decade", Social Indicators Research, 20, 1988,
pp. 177-180.
9. "Health and the quality of life", (with Bruno D. Zumbo and Anita Hubley),
Social Indicators Research, 51, 2000, pp. 245-286.
10. "Health and other aspects of the quality of life of older people", (with Anita
Hubley, Bruno D. Zumbo and Dawn Hemingway), Social Indicators Research,
54(3), 2001, pp. 239-274.
11. "Healthy days, health satisfaction and satisfaction with the overall quality of
life", (with Bruno D. Zumbo), Social Indicators Research, 2002, 59(3), pp.
321-338.
12. "Leisure activities, health and the quality of life", (with Bruno D. Zumbo),
not previously published.
13. "Social indicators research and health-related quality of life research", Social
Indicators Research, 2003.
xi