Health and welfare

Quality of life (QOL) is the general well-being of individuals and societies, outlining negative and positive features of life. It observes life satisfaction, including everything from physical health, family, education, employment, wealth, religious beliefs, finance and the environment. QOL has a wide range of contexts, including the fields of international development, healthcare, politics and employment. It is important not to mix up the concept of QOL with a more recent growing area of health related QOL (HRQOL). An assessment of HRQOL is effectively an evaluation of QOL and its relationship with health.

Quality of life should not be confused with the concept of standard of living, which is based primarily on income.

Standard indicators of the quality of life include not only wealth and employment but also the built environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, and social belonging.According to the World Health Organization (WHO), quality of life is defined as “the individual’s perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals.” In comparison to WHO’s definitions, the Wang-Baker Faces scale defines quality of life as “life quality (in this case, physical pain) at a precise moment in time.”

According to ecological economist Robert Costanza:

While Quality of Life (QOL) has long been an explicit or implicit policy goal, adequate definition and measurement have been elusive. Diverse "objective" and "subjective" indicators across a range of disciplines and scales, and recent work on subjective well-being (SWB) surveys and the psychology of happiness have spurred renewed interest.

One approach, called engaged theory, outlined in the journal of Applied Research in the Quality of Life, posits four domains in assessing quality of life: ecology, economics, politics and culture. In the domain of culture, for example, it includes the following subdomains of quality of life:

Also frequently related are concepts such as freedom, human rights, and happiness. However, since happiness is subjective and difficult to measure, other measures are generally given priority. It has also been shown that happiness, as much as it can be measured, does not necessarily increase correspondingly with the comfort that results from increasing income. As a result, standard of living should not be taken to be a measure of happiness. Also sometimes considered related is the concept of human security, though the latter may be considered at a more basic level and for all people.

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