Quality of life

[1] Standard indicators of the quality of life include wealth, employment, the environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, social belonging, religious beliefs, safety, security and freedom.

Researchers have begun in recent times to distinguish two aspects of personal well-being: Emotional well-being, in which respondents are asked about the quality of their everyday emotional experiences – the frequency and intensity of their experiences of, for example, joy, stress, sadness, anger and affection – and life evaluation, in which respondents are asked to think about their life in general and evaluate it against a scale.

According to ecological economist Robert Costanza:While Quality of Life (QOL) has long been an explicit or implicit policy goal, adequate definition and measurement have been elusive.

Its growing purpose has allowed governments, communities and organizations to use appropriate data to record happiness in order to enable policies to provide better lives.

along with the HDI, this report combines both objective and subjective measures to rank countries by happiness, which is deemed as the ultimate outcome of a high quality of life.

[16] The Happy Planet Index, introduced in 2006, is unique among quality of life measures in that, in addition to standard determinants of well-being, it uses each country's ecological footprint as an indicator.

Below this income level, respondents reported decreasing happiness and increasing sadness and stress, implying the pain of life's misfortunes, including disease, divorce, and being alone, is exacerbated by poverty.

Day-Reconstruction Method was another way of measuring happiness, in which researchers asked their subjects to recall various things they did on the previous day and describe their mood during each activity.

Being simple and approachable, this method required memory and the experiments have confirmed that the answers that people give are similar to those who repeatedly recalled each subject.

The method eventually declined as it called for more effort and thoughtful responses, which often included interpretations and outcomes that do not occur to people who are asked to record every action in their daily lives.

These two measures calculate the livability of countries and cities around the world, respectively, through a combination of subjective life-satisfaction surveys and objective determinants of quality of life such as divorce rates, safety, and infrastructure.

Wilson's theories have been used to justify the implementation of zero tolerance policies by many prominent American mayors, most notably Oscar Goodman in Las Vegas, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Rudolph Giuliani in New York City and Gavin Newsom in San Francisco.

Their Quality of Life Model is based on the categories "being", "belonging", and "becoming"; respectively who one is, how one is connected to one's environment, and whether one achieves one's personal goals, hopes, and aspirations.

[28][29] Experience sampling studies show substantial between-person variability in within-person associations between somatic symptoms and quality of life.

Many NGOs do not focus at all on reducing poverty on a national or international scale, but rather attempt to improve the quality of life for individuals or communities.

Global health has the potential to achieve greater political presence if governments were to incorporate aspects of human security into foreign policy.

Stressing individuals' basic rights to health, food, shelter, and freedom addresses prominent inter-sectoral problems negatively impacting today's society, and may lead to greater action and resources.

Integration of global health concerns into foreign policy may be hampered by approaches that are shaped by the overarching roles of defense and diplomacy.