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Social Monitoring and Reporting: A Success Story in Applied Research on Social Indicators and Quality of Life

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Abstract

From its beginnings research on social indicators was not primarily considered as pure, but rather applied research in terms of the regular monitoring of and reporting on quality of life. Thus, the successes—but eventually also failures—of social indicators research may first of all be visible in its most important field of application. Social monitoring and reporting activities, which can be traced back to the early 1970s provide quantitative information and empirically based analytical knowledge on well-being and progress in a single society or groups of societies to be used for different purposes, including policy making. Providing an overview over the variety of social monitoring and reporting projects emerging from social indicators research is supposed to be important with a view to form a more solid fundament for present and future discourses and initiatives in the field of measuring and monitoring well-being and progress. The article looks back to this field of applied social indicators research and—with a focus on Europe—identifies patterns and recent trends in this sort of activities. By looking forward, it finally discusses selected issues that are considered to be crucial for further improvements in this field.

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Notes

  1. More than 20 years ago, Noll and Zapf published this definition of quality of life: „Quality of life as a goal of social policy encompasses all fields of life and comprises, besides individual material and immaterial well-being, also collective values like freedom, justice, and the guarantee of natural conditions of life for present and future generations.” (Noll and Zapf 1994: 2). By the way: According to my own investigations, it was the economist A.C. Pigou, who in his famous opus „Economics of Welfare“ used the term „quality of life“ for the first time in order to denote non-economic aspects of welfare. See Noll (1982: 9).

  2. The publication of the British „Social Trends“ and the French „Données Sociales“ has been discontinued only recently.

  3. For more information on the eFrame-Project see: www.eframeproject.eu/.

  4. The stocktaking results are also accessible via an interactive online database, which provides information on ca. 230 national and supranational social monitoring and reporting activities. The online database is currently (November 2016) accessible under: http://www.gesis.org/en/services/data-analysis/social-indicators/database-activities-social-monitoring-and-reporting/.

  5. See: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/europe-2020-indicators.

  6. See: http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing.

  7. See e.g. the EU indicators in the areas of social inclusion and social protection (http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=756&langId=en).

  8. Finland turns out to be an exception on this account. See e.g. the „Findicators“ social monitoring initiative (www.findikaattori.fi/en) as well as the social report „Welfare in Finland“, which appeared 2014 in its 4th edition and is published by the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare.

  9. Most recently (October 2016), the first official report on „Quality of Life in Germany“ has been published by the German Federal Government (Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung 2016). An interactive as well as a print version of the report is available at: https://www.gut-leben-in-deutschland.de/static/LB/. English versions of the reports and related material are supposed to be available soon after the German ones.

  10. See e.g. Land/Michalos in this issue.

  11. See e.g. a recent EUROSTAT (2013) research report on now-casting poverty risks in Europe.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Social Indicators Research Centre, GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim, Germany

    Heinz-Herbert Noll

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Correspondence to Heinz-Herbert Noll.

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This article builds strongly on a “Stocktaking Report on Social Monitoring and Reporting in Europe” (Noll and Berger 2014), which is an outcome of the eFrame-Project (European Framework for Measuring Progress), funded by the European Commission under the Grant Agreement Number 290520. The full report is available at www.eframeproject.eu/fileadmin/Deliverables/Deliverable5.2.pdf.

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Noll, HH. Social Monitoring and Reporting: A Success Story in Applied Research on Social Indicators and Quality of Life. Soc Indic Res 135, 951–964 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1513-0

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