Quality of Life Indexes
- Arguably, one of the most widely valued social indicators is happiness. Social researchers often use the term quality of life (QOL) to describe what is commonly called “happiness.” One of the leading pioneers of happiness research is Dr. Ruut Veenhoven Happy Life Years#References, emeritus-professor of 'social conditions for human happiness' at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He is also one of the chief critics of one of the most widely used QOL indexes, the Human Development Index (HDI) published by the United Nations Development Programme(UNDP). His 1996 paper “Happy Life-Expectancy, A Comprehensive Measure of Quality-of Life in Nations”, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research, proposed an alternative QOL index, called ‘happy life expectancy,’ (HLE). HLE may be a better indicator of happiness as it relies on subjective measures of happiness, as opposed to the largely materialistic measures that go into creating the HDI.
Read more about this topic: Happy Life Expectancy
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