Social Indicators Research

, Volume 137, Issue 3, pp 831–846 | Cite as

Subjective Indicators Construction by Distance Indices: An Application to Life Satisfaction Data

Article
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Abstract

The construction of subjective indicators for measuring phenomena expressed in an ordinal scale is a central issue in social sciences, particularly in sociology and psychology. In this paper, we propose the use of a subjective indicator by groups of units (for example, by geographical area) based on the ‘distance’ between the empirical cumulative distribution and a hypothetical cumulative distribution of reference. This approach allows to avoid the awkward question of the ‘quantification’ of an ordinal variable, i.e., the conversion of an ordinal variable into an interval variable. As an example of application, we consider life satisfaction data coming from the annual multipurpose survey on “Aspects of Daily Life”, carried out by the Italian National Institute of Statistics, and we present a comparison with some classical methods.

Keywords

Ordinal data Quantification Subjective indicators 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The paper is the result of combined work of the authors: Sara Casacci has written Sects. 3 and 4; Adriano Pareto has written Sects. 1 and 2.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Italian National Institute of StatisticsRomeItaly

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