Measuring Healthy Days

The quality of life is a popular term that conveys an overall sense of well-being, including aspects of happiness and satisfaction with life as a whole. It is broad and subjective rather than specific and objective. What makes it so challenging to measure is that, although the term “quality of life” has meaning for nearly everyone and every academic discipline, what it actually means is somewhat different for each individual and group. How do you reach accord about a measure for quality of life? Perhaps the strongest area of a consensus is that quality of life is extraordinarily broad and conceptually complex, yet measures are most meaningful when they measure key concepts in a logical way and are as precise as possible. Although health is an important domain of overall quality of life, there are other domains as well—for instance, jobs, housing, schools, and the neighborhood. Aspects of culture, values, and spirituality are also key aspects of overall quality of life that add to the complexity of its measurement. Nevertheless, researchers in the fields of psychology and sociology have developed useful techniques that have helped to conceptualize and measure these multiple domains and how they relate to each other.