PARENT SESSION
Organized Oral Session 46: Ecological indicators at multiple scales
Organizer(s): F Müller and E Hyatt
Thursday, August 11, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 516 C, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Quality-of-life indicators at different scales.
Malkina-Pykh, Irina*,1, Pykh, Yuri1, 1 Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Cooperation INENCO RAS, St.-Petersburg, Russia
ABSTRACT- The term Quality of Life (QoL) has been widely used in a number of disciplines to express the idea of personal wellbeing in a framework, which goes beyond the simple economist equation of wellbeing with income. There are thus two related but separate concepts: individual QoL and social QoL. Of course social QoL contributes to individual QoL: (some) individuals feel better off when they live in a better society. But this is not the justification for pursuing social QoL. They are logically separate. International research into the quality of life tends to divide life into a number of domains, which are then studied separately. The subject answers a number of questions on how well he or she is doing in these various aspects of life. The responses are scored, weighted and combined in various ways, thus giving us a quality-of-life rating scale. Researchers seldom stop to contemplate why certain life domains are included while others are not. The lack of a theoretical framework is a decisive weakness in much of the empirical research on the quality of life. If practical research is to move forwards, it will have to rest on a sound theory: nothing is as practical as a good theory. Thus, one of the main experiences in quality of life research is that the reductionistic approach based on aspect-compartment oriented research methods has failed in analysing adequately complex, multidisciplinary, large-scale quality of life phenomena. A more promising way seems to be the holistic, integrated approach, based on a systems-oriented analysis, which concentrates on the interactions and feedback mechanisms between the different subsystems of cause-effect chains rather than focusing on each subsystem in isolation. In our study we propose the method of response functions as a method of the construction of purposeful, credible integrated models from data and prior knowledge or information. The approach to the measurement of the quality of life derives from the position that there are a number of domains of living. It is shown that we should create such QOL models which will allow to obtain indices as the direct output of the models.
Key words: quality-of-life, indicators, models, scales