Social Quality Indicators

Abstract

A key endeavour behind the construction of indicators is to better understand the differences between countries and regions and to deepen our grasp of the positive and negative consequences of these differences for the social quality experienced in them. The EC is well aware of crucial differences among the EU’s regions. This is at the heart of its recent agenda and is supposed to be represented in Europe’s key instruments such as the single market, the Lisbon Strategy for growth and jobs and the sustainable development strategy. The EC argues that to address serious problems such as child poverty, gender inequalities, unemployment or environmental problems more information is needed about the daily circumstances of citizens living in the member states. It argues that awareness and analysis of social issues has often been hampered by the lack of complete and up-to-date EU-wide statistics and indicators (EC, 2007b). However, the issue is not only a lack of comparable statistics, although this is a problem, but also, the lack of theoretically grounded indicators. As Bouget and Salladarré (2005: 86) remark, in France ‘the social indicators were not based on any clear theoretical corpus. As a result, they were tenuously based on a weak consensus between the researchers or between the representatives of social institutions.’

We are grateful for the contributions by Margo Keizer, Dave Gordon and David Phillips.