Quality of life facts for kids

For other uses, see Quality of life (disambiguation).

Quality of life (often called QOL) is about how good someone's life is, from their own point of view. The World Health Organization says it's how people see their place in the world, based on their culture, values, goals, and hopes. It looks at many things that make life good, like having enough wealth (money), a good job, a clean environment, good physical and mental health, education, fun recreation and leisure time, feeling like you fit in with others, religious beliefs, safety, and freedom.

Quality of life is important in many areas, such as how countries grow, healthcare, politics, and jobs. When we talk about health-related quality of life (HRQOL), we are looking at how a person's health affects their overall quality of life.

What Makes Up a Good Life?
How Do We Measure Quality of Life?
Quality of Life in Healthcare
Quality of Life in International Development
See also
- Indices

What Makes Up a Good Life?

One way to think about quality of life is through something called engaged theory. This idea suggests that four main areas help us understand how good life is:

Ecology: This is about the natural world around us.
Economics: This covers money, jobs, and how people earn a living.
Politics: This deals with how a country is run and the rules it has.
Culture: This includes beliefs, ideas, and how people live together.

Within the culture part, there are many sub-areas that affect quality of life:

Beliefs and ideas people have
Being creative and having fun
Learning and asking questions
How different genders and generations live together
Feeling like you belong and are involved
Remembering the past and planning for the future
Feeling well and healthy

Other ideas often linked to quality of life are freedom, human rights, and happiness. However, since happiness can be hard to measure, other things are often looked at first. Also, just having more money doesn't always mean someone is happier. So, a high standard of living isn't the same as being happy.

How Do We Measure Quality of Life?

It's tricky to measure quality of life for whole countries or groups of people, unlike things like a country's GDP (how much money it makes), which is easy to count. Researchers have started to look at two parts of how people feel:

Emotional well-being: This is about how people feel every day, like how often they feel joy, stress, sadness, anger, or love.
Life evaluation: This is when people think about their life in general and rate it on a scale.

Many different ways exist to measure quality of life, especially in terms of health, money, and things people own. But it's harder to measure if people are truly living out their dreams and desires. One way is to see how much individuals have achieved their own goals. For some, quality of life simply means happiness, which is how someone feels inside. People in developing countries might feel very happy with just basic things like health care, education, and safety for their children.

Human Development Index (HDI)

One of the most common ways to measure how well countries are doing is the Human Development Index (HDI). It combines how long people are expected to live, how much education they get, and their standard of living. This helps to show the choices people have in a society. The United Nations Development Programme uses the HDI in its reports.

Since 2010, the United Nations also uses the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). The original HDI shows a country's "potential" for human development. The IHDI, however, shows the "actual" level of development, taking into account how evenly things like health and education are shared among people.

World Happiness Report

Map showing happiness of countries by their score according to the 2018 World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report is a big study that looks at how happy people are around the globe. It ranks 156 countries based on their happiness levels. This shows that more and more, people are interested in using happiness to see how well human development is going. Governments, communities, and groups use this data to make policies that can help people live better lives. The reports explain why some people and countries are happier than others.

This report, also created by the United Nations, ranks countries by happiness. It uses information from Gallup surveys, a country's wealth (GDP per person), how long people live healthy lives, if people feel they have someone to rely on, their freedom to make life choices, how free they are from corruption, and how generous they are. Happiness is now seen as a very important goal for governments worldwide.

Other Ways to Measure

The Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) was created in the 1970s. It looked at basic reading skills, how many babies died, and how long people lived. Even though it's not as detailed as other measures and has mostly been replaced by the HDI, it was important because it tried to show a more hopeful picture by focusing on areas that were getting better globally.

The Happy Planet Index, started in 2006, is special because it also looks at how much each country uses the Earth's resources (its ecological footprint). Because of this, European and North American countries don't always rank highest. In 2012, countries like Costa Rica, Vietnam, and Colombia were at the top.

In 2010, researchers found that Denmark was one of the happiest countries. From 2014 to 2016, Norway took the top spot.

A 2010 study found that people's overall satisfaction with their lives generally goes up with income. However, their daily emotional experiences (like joy or stress) tend to level off after a certain income (around $75,000 per year in 2010). This means that earning more money above this amount doesn't necessarily make people feel happier or less stressed every day. Below this income, people reported less happiness and more sadness and stress, suggesting that problems like disease, divorce, or being alone feel worse when you are poor.

Some governments, like Bhutan and the United Kingdom, use measures of happiness like Gross national happiness. The OECD also created a guide for using these kinds of measures in 2013.

The Social Progress Index measures how well countries meet the social and environmental needs of their citizens. It uses many different factors to show how nations are doing.

Livability

The term quality of life is also used to describe how good a city or country is to live in, which is called livability. Two well-known ways to measure livability are the Economist Intelligence Unit's Where-to-be-born Index and Mercer's Quality of Living Reports. These reports combine surveys about how happy people are with facts like divorce rates, safety, and how good the buildings and roads are. These measures usually apply to a whole city or country, not just one person.

The Economist Intelligence Unit named Vienna the most livable city in 2019.

Quality of Life in Healthcare

In healthcare, quality of life often means how a sickness or health problem affects a patient. This could be a weakness that isn't life-threatening, an illness that is serious but not deadly, a terminal illness, or the natural decline in health as someone gets older. Researchers at the University of Toronto define quality of life as "The degree to which a person enjoys the important possibilities of his or her life." Their model looks at three main parts:

Being: Who a person is.
Belonging: How a person is connected to their surroundings.
Becoming: Whether a person achieves their personal goals and hopes.

Many tools are used to measure health-related quality of life, such as AQoL-8D, EQ5D – Euroqol, 15D, SF-36, SF-6D, and HUI.

Quality of Life in International Development

Quality of life is a key idea in international development because it helps us understand how countries are improving in a more complete way than just looking at their standard of living. Different groups have different ideas about what makes a good change for a society. How they define quality of life shapes how they work to improve it.

For example, the World Bank aims for "a world free of poverty." They define poverty as not having basic human needs like food, water, shelter, freedom, education, healthcare, or jobs. In other words, poverty means a low quality of life. So, the World Bank tries to improve quality of life by reducing poverty and helping people afford a better life.

Other groups, like many NGOs (non-governmental organizations), might work differently. They might not focus on reducing poverty for a whole country, but instead try to improve the quality of life for individuals or small communities. For instance, some programs provide help directly to specific people. Even if these groups also talk about fighting poverty, their methods are quite different.

Improving quality of life needs action from both NGOs and governments. If governments included human safety and well-being in their foreign policy, global health could become a bigger priority. Focusing on people's basic rights to health, food, shelter, and freedom can help solve big problems in society and lead to more action and resources.