Abstract
The approach of monitoring and analyzing quality of life rests on concepts and methods which are a combination of thinking from the fields of social science, philosophy, psychology, politics, economics and social statistics. Quality of life and wellbeing are goals that have explicit emerged since the last century. The components of quality of life are mainly focused on positive wellbeing but also to negative wellbeing and to future expectations. Quality of life research is interested in evaluations of good and bad states of society, which easily leads to disputes about their value basis. The world is divided into objective and subjective reality; the subjective reality is the perception of ordinary people, whereas the objective reality refers to the definition of experts after having made carefully investigations of reality. There are many possible ways to monitor and analyze quality of life. The problem is that the methods influence the results. A main problem of quality of life can be seen in the relationship between diversity and inequality on the globe. This chapter gives an overview of the topic of quality of life as well of the structure and content of the book.
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Notes
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Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19–22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization, no. 2, p. 100); came into force on 7 April 1948.
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Jolly, Richard/Emmerij, Louis/Weiss, Thomas G./Hall, Jonathan: Human Development Reporting and the United Nations. See section of these authors in Chap. 7.
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Glatzer, W. (2015). Monitoring and Analyzing Quality of Life – An Introduction. In: Glatzer, W., Camfield, L., Møller, V., Rojas, M. (eds) Global Handbook of Quality of Life. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9178-6_1
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