Assessing Quality of Life and Living Conditions to Guide National Policy: The State of the Art

This volume should be a useful resource for four groups of readers: to researchers interested in best practices for well-established surveys of living conditions, the papers by Boelhouwer, Noll, Vogel, and Berger-Schmitt will be of special interest; to researchers and policy analysts interested in establishing a living-conditions report in their country, the papers by Kamen, Moller and Dickow, Estes, Andersen and Poppel, May, Stevens and Stols and Aasland and Tyldum give information about developing credibility, consensus-building and survey design; for researchers interested in cross-national comparison, the papers by Hudler and Richter, and Delhey, Bohnke, Habich and Zapf describe the rich resources already available, as well as problems of different wording, interpretation, etc; and finally, for citizens wishing to effect changes in public policy, and for researchers studying that process, the papers by Ferris, Estes, Hagerty and Behrendt outline how organizations should select goals, utilize social indicators and develop programmes that improve the quality of life in their nations.