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Fifty Years After the Social Indicators Movement: Has the Promise Been Fulfilled?

An Assessment an Agenda for the Future

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Abstract

This paper reviews the origins, promise, and subsequent development of social indicators/quality-of-life/well-being conceptualizations and research since the 1960s. It then assesses the state of this field in the 2010s and identifies four key developments—the development of professional organizations that nurture its conceptual and empirical development; the widespread political, popular, and theoretical appeal of the quality-of-life (QOL) concept; a new era of the construction of composite or summary social indicators; and a recognition of the key role of the QOL concept in connecting social indicators to the study of subjective well-being—that have evolved over the past five decades and that are very much with us today. The final section of the paper poses the question of where the field should focus its energies. Beyond carrying on the existing research program, it argues that the field needs to recognize the substantial changes in the social and economic organization of contemporary societies as compared to the mid-1960s launch period for the Social Indicators Movement and develop new research foci for the years to come.

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Fig. 1

Source Vogel (1999)

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Source Land (2014b)

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Source Land (2015)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Center for Population Health and Aging, Duke University, Duke Box 90088, Durham, NC, 27708-0088, USA

    Kenneth C. Land

  2. Political Science, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, Canada

    Alex C. Michalos

  3. 1506 Kilborn Ave., Ottawa, ON, K1H 6M2, Canada

    Alex C. Michalos

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  1. Kenneth C. Land
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Correspondence to Kenneth C. Land.

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The authors were not members of the cohort of social scientists who initiated the Social Indicators Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They did, however, join this group of scholars in the 1970s and have been active in the field ever since.

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Land, K.C., Michalos, A.C. Fifty Years After the Social Indicators Movement: Has the Promise Been Fulfilled?. Soc Indic Res 135, 835–868 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1571-y

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