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Social Indicators and Quality of Life Measures

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Concepts and Tools of Computer-assisted Policy Analysis

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Abstract

The roots of the social indicator movement can be found in early government reports. The first was initiated by President Hoover in 1929. The committee was commissioned to investigate changing social values and interests. Among the many such values they investigated were: farm life, leisure time, criminal justice, health care and government services. As the commission’s chairman, Wesley C. Mitchell and the report’s director, William Ogburn stated in the preface:

The primary value of this report is to be found in the effort to interrelate the disjointed factors and elements in the social life of America, in the attempt to view the situation as a whole rather than a cluster of parts1.

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Footnotes

Sec. I.

  1. President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends (Government Printing Office, 1933), p. XII - XIII.

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  2. Wilbert Moore and Eleanor Sheldon, “Monitoring Social Change - A Conceptual and Programmatic Statement” in Proceedings of the Social Statistics Section, American Statistical Association, pp. 144–152.

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  3. L. D. Wilcox, R. M. Brooks, G. M. Beal, G. E. Klonglan, Social Indicators and Societal Monitoring Jossey-Bass Inc., San Francisco, 1972.

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  4. Betram Gross, “The State of the Nation: Social. Systems Accounting”, pp. 270–271, Bauer (Editor), Social Indicators

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  5. Eleanor Bernert Sheldon and Robert Parke, “Social Indicators”, Science Vol. 188, 16 May 1975, pp. 693–699.

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Sec. II.

  1. Toward a Social Report (U.S. Department of HEW, 1969:97).

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  2. Kenneth Land, “Social Indicator Models, an Overview”, p. 20 in Kenneth Land and Seymour Spilerman (editors), Social Indicator Models (Rusell Sage Foundation; 1975 ).

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  3. For example see the above mentioned authors: Kenneth Land, “On the Definition of Social Indicators” in The American Sociologist (Volume Six, November, pp. 322–325) and Mancur Olson, “Social Indicators and Social Accounts”, in Socio-Economic Planning Science (Volume 2, pp. 325–346 ).

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  4. This point has been made by a number of authors. See Kenneth Land, Social Indicator Models, p. 17.

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  5. Douglas Harland, “The Content, Measurement, and Forecasting of Quality of Life”, Volume I, Social and Human Analyses Branch, Canadian Department of Regional Economic Expansion.

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  6. Otis Dudley Duncan, in “Toward Social Reportings: Next Steps.” Paper Number 2 in Social Science Frontier Series. Rusell Sage Foundation, 1969.

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  7. ibid, p. 9.

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  8. Kenneth Land and Seymour Spilerman (eds.), Social Indicators Models, p. 17 (Rusell Sage Foundation, 1975 )

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  9. ibid, pp. 17–18.

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  10. Social Indicators Newsletters“,March 1973, Number 1, published by the SSRC.

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  11. ibid, p. 19.

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  12. James A. David, The Log Linear Analysis of Survey Replications“ in Social Indicator Models Kenneth Land and Seymour Spilerman (eds.).

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  13. Robert Parke and Eleanor Sheldon, “The Need for Social Indicators” from the Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association, p. 99–105. 99.

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  14. See for example, Robert Parke and Eleanor Sheldon, “Social Statistics for Public Policy” a section entitled “Involvement of Unive rsity Research” in the 1973 Social Statistics Section; Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, pp. 105–112; 111.

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  15. ibid, p. 111.

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Sec. III.

  1. Please see Appendix–for a complete listing of the publications and agencies from which they are obtainable.

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  2. Ralph Brooks, “Social Planning and Societal Monitoring”, pp. 22–26 in Social Indicators and Societal Monitoring.

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  3. This discussion is being generated from two basic sources, Wolfgang Zapf, “Social Indicators, 1973: Comparison with Social Reports of Other Nations”, and Natalie Rogoff Ransey, “Social Indicators in the United States and Europe: Comments on Five Country Reports”. Both can be found in, “Social Indicators 1973: A Review Symposium”,Roxann Van Dusen, ed., obtainable from the Social Science Research Council, Center for Coordination of Research on Social Indicators. I have freely merged these articles and accordingly, the entire discussion minus errors should be credited to them.

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  4. ibid, p. 40.

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  5. Whitepaper on National Life 1973: The Life and Its Quality in Japan, see appendix for citations.

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  6. About Dimensions of Welfare: An Exploratory Analysis of a Comparative Scandinavian Study, see appendix for citations.

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  7. See references in the Appendix.

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  8. op cit, p. VIII.

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  9. About Dimensions of Welfare (full citation in Appendix) Erik Allardt. A shorter discussion of the study can be found under the same title in Scandinavian Political Studies (Volume 7/1972).

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  10. Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (Harper & Row, New York, 1970) see Chapter 7.

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  11. Report on the World Social Condition, (United Nations Publication E/CN. 5/456; ST/SOA/110).

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  12. Op Cit, p. 3.

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  13. Ralph Pieris, “The Implantation of Sociology in Asia: printed in the International Social Science Journal, (Vol. XXI, No. 3).

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  14. See reference in the Appendix.

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  15. Davis Bobrow, “International Indicators”, unpublished study. Obtainable from the Harold Scott Quigley Center for International Studies; University of Minnesota.

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  16. The 32 member nations of the OECD are: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Formosa, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, U. S. A., Venezuela, Yugoslavia.

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Sec. IV.

  1. Anton Schmalz, et. al., “Social Indicators” a report to the National Science Foundation, New World Systems, July, 1972.

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  2. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Monitoring, Environmental Studies Division, The Quality of Life Concept: A Potential New Tool for Decision-Makers p. 1–4 (Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.).

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  3. Richard James, “Measuring the Quality of Life”, The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 1972.

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  4. Kenneth Hornback and Robert Shaw, Jr., “Toward a Quantitative Measure of the Quality of Life”. Quality of Life Symposium, Environmental Protection Agency, August, 1972.

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  5. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Monitoring, Environmental Studies Division, The Quality of Life Concept: A Potential New Tool for Decision Makers p. I-10 (Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C.).Karl Fox, Social Indicators and Social Theory: Elements of an Operational Theory ( Wiley and Sons, New York; 1974 ).

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  6. Kenneth Kenniston, The Uncommitted Harcourt Brace and World: New York, 1965. Or see same author, same publisher, 1968, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth Charles Reich, The Greening of America Random House: New York, 1970. Also published in paperback by Bantam.

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  7. The First and Second Discourses Jean-Jacques Rousseau, edited by Robert D. Masters, published by St. Martin’s Press, New York, Picture appears on page 76.

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  8. Justice William Douglas, appears as comment on Reich’s Greening of America on the previously cited edition (ibid).

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  9. Op cit., p. 35/58, “A Theory of Human Motivation”, my apologies for the imprecise rendering of the argument.

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Sec. V.

  1. Op. cit. The Quality of Life Concept. (P-I-14).

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  2. Ira Whitman and Staff, “Design of an Environmental Evaluation System”. Battelle-Columbus Laboratories, June 1971, obtainable by request, and “Toward Master Social Indicators”, (Stanford Research Insitute, 1971.).

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  3. Dalkey, Rourke, Lewis and Snyder, Studies in the Quality of Life (D. C. Heath and Company: Lexington, Mass. 1972) is a description of this effort. It will be discussed in more detail in the subsection on survey method.

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  4. Eleanor Sheldon and Kenneth C. Land, “Social reporting for the 1970’s: A review and programmatic statement”. (Policy Sciences, 3 pgs., 137–151:146).

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  5. This technique, especially in regard to Quality of Life Measures, is explained in Dalkey’s work cited at the beginning of this section.

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  6. William Watts and Lloyd Free, The State of the Nation (Universe Books; New York, New York, 1973 ).

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  7. Frank M. Andrews and Stephen B. Withey, “Developing Measures of Perceived Life Quality: Results from Several National Surveys, ”Social Indicators Research 1(1974), 1–26. Frank M. Andrews,“Social Indicators of Perceived Life Quality”,Social Indicators Research 1 (1974), 279–299.

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  8. Mancur Olson, On the Information for Assessing and Improving the ‘Quality of Life’. Unpublished Monograph.

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  9. Talcott Parsons, “Systems Analysis: Social Systems: in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences: Vol. 15. ( New York; The Free Press and Macmillan: 1968 ).

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  10. Roger Barker, Ecological Psychology: Concepts and Methods for Studying the Environment of Human Behavior (Stanford University Press: 1968).

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Sec. VI.

  1. Carlos Malimann, “Quality of Life and Development Alternatives”, Fundacion Bariloche, Bariloche, Argentina, Sept. 1975.

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  2. UNESCO Seminar on “Social Aspects of Economic and Cultural Development and Working Out of Social and Cultural Indicators in World Models” Moscow, 8–11 June 1976. This conference was the third of a series “World Models: Images of Society and Man” organized by the International Social Science Council of UNESCO.

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Authors
  1. Patrick Bond
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Hartmut Bossel

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© 1977 Springer Basel AG

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Bond, P. (1977). Social Indicators and Quality of Life Measures. In: Bossel, H. (eds) Concepts and Tools of Computer-assisted Policy Analysis. Interdisciplinary Systems Research / Interdisziplinäre Systemforschung. Birkhäuser, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-5570-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-5570-9_6

  • Publisher Name: Birkhäuser, Basel

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-7643-0921-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-0348-5570-9

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