Quality of life, an objective and subjective variable analysis

Abstract

Kuz T.J. (1978) Quality of life: an objective and subjective variable analysis, Reg. Studies 12, 409–417. Recently a large number of studies under the headings of quality of life, social indicators and levels of living have appeared. These studies have employed in most cases only the most readily available and accessible data. It is the contention of this research that quality of life studies based on only objective (counts of various types of phenomena) or subjective (measures based on people's perceptions and feelings) variables give very different results. This is well illustrated when applied to analysing quality of life variations in urban centres in Southern Manitoba, Canada as the correlation between the two indexes based on the two categories of variables is only r_s = 0·07.