Abstract
Respondents participating in a national quality of life study were asked to assess their levels of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with each of a set of fifteen domains of their lives. They were also asked to describe their lives as a whole, using both satis-faction and semantic-differential types of scales. Canonical correlation analysis was used to find the combinations of domain-specific and global items with the highest correlation. The two indices derived from this analysis, the Index of Well-being and the Index of Domain Satisfactions, have been examined in relation to a variety of demographic and situational variables, including age, indicators of socioeconomic status, employment status, and size of community. The relationships discovered provide some preliminary evidence for the validity of these indices. The reliability of the measures (as measured cross-sectionally) and their stability over a period of some eight months are both acceptably high. We conclude that both of these measures form acceptable indicators of the perceived overall quality of life.
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Additional information
This paper is based on data from an Institute for Social Research study, ‘Monitoring the Quality of American Life.’ A fuller report of the findings is presented in a manuscript tentatively entitled ‘The Quality of American Life’ by A. Campbell, P. E. Converse and W. L. Rodgers, which is to be published in the Fall of 1975 by the Russell Sage Foundation, which also provided the major funding for the survey.
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Rodgers, W.L., Converse, P.E. Measures of the perceived overall quality of life. Soc Indic Res 2, 127–152 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00300532
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00300532