First, I would keep a distance from sustainability concepts, concerning human life quality (because this burns down to economic reform in a capitalist system=systems maintenance). Second, the human bias is built into every questionnaire, concerning life quality; it is always built on the subjective perspective of the interviewer. Third, I do think, all research that is based around happiness is a good starting point for your work; most foundations do apply a happiness index, and this indexes could be methodically compared.

Dear Abhay Singh.

As I see it, one's quality of life depends on his/her well-being in physical, psychological and spiritual terms. I use to say that we can assess one's quality of life by seeing to what extent one lives in peace and and harmony with himself/herself, the others and the universe. It is often said that for one to have quality of life one has to have heath, love, and money to survive.

Best wishes,

Orlando

Abhay,

It depends on your perspective. Are you viewing quality of life (QOL) in the absence of pathophysiology or in the presence of pathophysiology (disease)? There are basic commonalites when surveys are performed but each person truly determines what QOL is for themselves. I had a patient once that determi that as long as they could enjoy chocolate ice cream then “life was worth living“ but not being able to eat chocolate ice cream = no QOL. Whereas my father equated the ability to play golf as QOL. Far different goals.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a2a8/fc3722ce868ac3cc37fd539f50afa31f4445.pdf

Dear Dr Lourenço and Dr Smith thank you so much for your input.

Quality of Life is measured with standardized questionnaires in Psychology. There are few around and there is also Health related Quality of Life (HQoL) is its the health aspects you want to focus on.

Number one factor for humans? It would have to be universal - what do all people want to have more of?

I would argue that it is the time available to the individual for activities other than those required to meet needs, as if all needs were met. That is to say, I want more time to do the things I want to do, rather than the things I have to do. But I also want to make sure that I get all the things done that I have to do.

I would say the Potential Quality of Life is the time available for activities other than those required to meet needs. It would be PQoL=24h/d/ca - TU, where TU is the time used to meet needs.

I would also say that the Actualized Quality of Life is the time available for activities other than those required to meet needs, as it all needs were being met. This requires calculating the fraction of needs that are being met within the community. I would calculate how effectively needs are being met, for each need separately, and then calculate the time-weighted sum. So Effi= sum(time spent at meeting need (i) of the people who have that particular need met)/sum(time spent at meeting need (i) of all the people in the community; and Eff = sum (Effi x TUi) /24h/d/ca, for all i; and AQoL= 24h/d/ca--(24h/d/ca-PQoL)/Eff.

A need is something that is an aspect of human nature, and that by having a need met, one is preventing degradation of the self, family, or community. Thus the needs could be listed as 'sleep', 'food', 'water/hygiene/sanitation', 'homeostasis', 'security', 'community', 'meaning', 'intimacy', 'child care', 'health care', 'education', and so on. It is a finite list, best determined by the community being assessed rather than the assessor. The boundary of needs must also be chosen by the community; eg. a community with food security may think that only food grown in the community would be meeting a need, and imported food was not.

Poverty would occur when the AQoL 0. Affluence occurs when the PQoL>0 and the slope of PQoL with respect to resource consumption

The answer depends on a good theory about what constitutes good and poor human functioning. Such theories are still far from perfect and not generally endorsed. In the meantime, we psychologists help ourselves with folk psychology notions about quality of life, including those who construct inventories to assess quality of life. Better something than nothing.

Dear Abhay:

That is a very good question. In my experience, in Reiki therapy, most of my patients that share their experience, can tell that a good spiritual (and you can call it emotional or psycological) status, has improve their quality of life, that means health, internal peace, wealth and you name it.

In other hand, I think that the poor quality of life, is because lack of money in order to, at least, have meal every day. Here in Mexico (as many other countries) still have a poor community people, so Their main concern is to have somthing to eat. And that lead us to another issue in public nutrition.

So we have a lot of work to do.

First, I would keep a distance from sustainability concepts, concerning human life quality (because this burns down to economic reform in a capitalist system=systems maintenance). Second, the human bias is built into every questionnaire, concerning life quality; it is always built on the subjective perspective of the interviewer. Third, I do think, all research that is based around happiness is a good starting point for your work; most foundations do apply a happiness index, and this indexes could be methodically compared.

Quality of life for human being includes various factors like happiness, education, comfort, satisfaction, family, many more..

Any created system that sets out to do a task concerned with the wellbeing or welfare of the population tends upon the establishment of the agreed on procedures to contain within it processes that function against public wellbeing and welfare.

For example (just one of many) professional control (within the framework of employment, wages, hierarchies and careers) will move such organisations or structures towards meeting the needs of professionals who run or engage with the services. Although never complete this will alone overturn many of the positives of the original template.

Whatever is done, this negative re-adjustment will occur requiring tweaking and constant, and expensive, re-adjustment back (if possible) towards original paradigms of care.

You can't really name only one thing that creates quality of life. It depends very much on the starting point: for those starving, having enough to eat would mean QOL, for someone else it would be travelling, studying, health...

I would say you need economic basis, i.e. to be able to buy anything you consider important, than physical and psycological health to be able to use those and emotional health to be able to feel happy.

Quality of life leads to well being of people .

In such situation, not only the people feel satisfied with their achievements but also feel motivated and aspire for better living conditions.

People feel better quality of life , if they are gainfully employed/ engaged.

It also stimulates creativity amongst people.

Quality of life is not only very particular for everyone, but it also changes. Quality of life is measured on what the individual perceives at that moment to be missing, more than what they have (would be easier to be perceived when the individual feels that they would be happier if they had whatever is missing.

So, it varies from time to time, because once you obtain what you thought would make you happy, then something else will take that place.

For instance, if I do not have money to eat my 3 meals per day, then for me, quality of of life would be to be able to eat 3 times per day.

If I have pain, then quality of life would be being pain free

The perception of what confers a quality life, will change overtime. But one thing is true: the ultimate goal of human being is reach happiness. The issue is what will you need to get you there...it is never the same...

A complete answer for your questions you find in:

Power M.J(2015) Quality of Life. In Shane J. Lopez and C.R. Snyder(Eds) Positive Psychological Assessment (7rd ed., pp 427-441), Washington,DC: American Psychological Association.

In psychology, there is a term Experiential Deprivation. In Indian mythology also it is described. I have forgotten the exact proverb which depicts that be happy in less items. One does not have TV but he is not feeling deprived from the TV. One has one TV but not satisfied because that TV is in his drawing room and he goes all the way to see TV from his bedroom. So the measurement of Experiential Deprivation may serve the purpose. Many questionnaires are available in the market for this purpose. Best of luck.

I have developed 4 questionnaires (3 published) that address various aspects of quality of life. The Friedman Well-Being; Quality of Life, Life Balance and Awakening Scales. They correlate quite highly with each other but each taps a slightly different aspect of quality of life. They can also be used to track change over time as they are easily administered, scored, recorded and tracked.

I find Maslow’s Pyramid a good reference point for thinking about quality of life, but NOT as an answer. I don’t think there can actually be a measurement that truly works for people, but there can be a defined clear statistical measurement that gives some indication. Some people are happy at the bottom of Maslow’s Pyramid, some will never be happy unless they get to the top. Ravi Ambast’s point is really critical, I believe, and see everywhere in London, UK, where people will buy a mobile phone instead of food, and similar. Also, drugs and alcholol etc destroy quality of life, but require money to obtain, and provide a maladjusted group for people to belong to. Some of these concepts can be like the Quest for the Holy Grail. But, I do think they are worthwhile, if their limitations and objectives made very clear. It is a bit like defining someone’s Personality. More and more I think the first reply should be ‘Which one?’.

Maslow was published in a marketing magazine, and goes on to say how he developed his pyramid by observing the top 1% most successful people, and found that needs gave way to habits very quickly. I prefer Manfred Max Neef and his understanding of needs, except that I would define the concept in a testable way: A need is an aspect of human nature that is met by activities that prevent the degradation of the self, the family, and/or the community. Someone who doesn't have their needs met would have Chronic Stress, and there would be other symptoms based on which need was unmet.

I like Amartya Sen's concept of quality of life coming from having needs met.

I liken some of the challenge in the topic to some of the errors we have propagated without thought. For example, in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, he says that needs are finite, but wants are infinite. This is wrong. You only have 24h/d to meet all of your wants and needs. It may be correct to say that wants are unbounded, but that is certainly not the same thing as infinite.

I think it is similar with quality of life. We ask individuals about their subjective self-perception of quality of life, and we can't get a quantitative assessment. But if we tested for how people are demonstrating symptoms of unmet needs, I think it would produce an objective assessment of how their quality of life manifests itself.

Does anyone check for symptoms of unmet needs?

The quality of our collective emotional and social well being can be measure by those we deem the least worthy.

If we were to try and objectively measure wellbeing don't we have to first measure what it is we humans live within - the social systems and structures built by those with the power to do so? If a child grows up without access to culture and community - as many do with the forced removal of First Nation's children then is it just or ethical to measure their wellbeing based on scales created for those who have had continuing access to culture and community?

Poverty, discrimination and inequitable distribution of power and resources have, continuously, been shown to negatively correlate with distress. Social determinants of wellbeing and the cumulative effects of social stress - homelessness, un & under employment, family & domestic violence and systemic & interpersonal discrimination all create our sense of wellness.

People living with poverty often 'binge buy' what they see as comfort & safety. So, yes, many will buy a mobile phone or get a manicure or buy "junk" food because they are consciously searching for quick fixes of contentment and comfort. They know the next chance may be a while away, so take what is there and use the product to retrieve some resemblance of wellness. But the intermittent and maladaptive way of achieving wellness creates more distress, and yet they are, even fleetingly, meeting a genuine need.

Another example, a women living with domestic violence. Through the pain and conflict she will hope for those brief glimpses of her man. Not the one who is hitting her, the one she just knows is the real one. The one she knew back before the stress & the alcohol. Her sense of well depends on that hope, that tomorrow he will be the kind, loving, affectionate man she fell in love with. She's living with complicated social and interpersonal distress, but ask her how she is feeling the day the kind, loving, affectionate husband in there and she will tell you the world is paved with gold!

You cannot simplify the complexity of human experience to an objective measure of well. The well of today is too dependent on what has come before, what could come tomorrow & what those with power over us choose to do next.

36-Item Short Form Survey (SF-36)

https://www.rand.org/health/surveys_tools/mos/36-item-short-form.html

It is indeed a hard question and the chances are it is different for everyone. In my humble -non scienentific- opinion besides primary needs like food and stuff it is the room for making connections, not only social but also biological in the sence that the brain must have room to make connections in order to have a chance at reaching fulfillment

People appreciate the importance of key issues determining the quality of life in the event of a threat of loss. For example, health, maintaining health, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, people usually appreciate when on themselves or on the example of close relatives of family or friends notice that the issue of health is only a matter of time, that with the aging of the body increases the risk of appearance various diseases and, consequently, loss of health and gradual deterioration of the quality of life.

Of course, other values, such as material goods, income level, consumption level of life are also important factors affecting the perception of quality of life and it is also an important area of ​​sociological research. However, in terms of the assessment of the material situation, eg in this also income-related, residential, there are various research approaches. In the context of sociological and economic research, these are important factors shaping the assessment of the level of life of citizens in a given society, economic region, in a given country.

On the other hand, a subjective assessment from the point of view of a particular person may be incomparable to other people representing other cultures and, hence, other value systems. The basis of this thesis is, for example, a different level of life satisfaction, a different awareness of a happy life, a different state of health, a different life expectancy, other meaning of eg health and leading a healthy lifestyle when comparing different communities representing different cultures.

Best wishes

For those interested the 20 item version of the Friedman Life Balance Scale which is one of my scales measuring aspects of quality of life (the others are the Friedman Well-Being, Friedman Quality of Life and Friedman Spiritual Awakening Scales) can be found in the appendix of my article (10/18) called

Reflections From 50 Years of Integrative Psychotherapy Emphasizing Practiced-Based Evidence and Effectiveness. The url is:

https://tinyurl.com/y6pkyvo6

I'm glad this topic has come back up. I've been reading Ian Gough recently, and he has an excellent theory of needs. He says the fundamental human need is to function effectively within a community, and all other needs are subsequent to that. He also says that people seek to meet their needs to avoid harm.

"Happiness" is too subjective since one person may believe happiness is experiencing joy while another may believe it is satisfaction with their life. Based on recent reading on childhood trauma, one of the greatest causes of mental suffering, it is likely being accepted and loved/lovable. A close second is likely self-efficacy, which is also central to quality of life.

Quality of Life (QoL) has been discussed in the health sector as it should be comparable to the each individual situation.

Well being as a concept has been used even at definition of health by WHO (1946).

Conceptually 'well being'' might be acceptable while the construct required for measurement purposed could be several scales including SF36 as Urszula Lopuszanska mentioned and the Philip H. Friedman Friedman Quality of Life scale.

Hello, it might be worth differentiating older people from younger as younger tend to think it's is hedonistic experiences that make you feel quality of life is good. Older people tend to downplay hedonistic values and rather favour moral values and meaningful social relations.

All the best.

Nicolay Gausel