Ideology and social indicators of the quality of life

✍ Scribed by Frederick H. Buttel; E. A. Wilkening; Oscar B. Martinson

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1977
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 803 KB
• Volume: 4
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0303-8300
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00353138

✦ Synopsis

This paper explores the possibility that social-psychological, evaluative measures of social well-being/quality of life (QOL) perceptions may embody unintended ideological elements. We argue that individual QOL satisfactions are likely caused, in part, by 'satisfactions', or conservative orientations, vis~-vis societal institutions. Four dependent measures of QOL attitudes -overall fife satisfaction, service satisfaction, community satisfaction, and powerlessness -are derived from factor analyses and established measurement procedures. Each of these QOL indicators is found to exhibit significant bivariate associations with measures of political-economic ideology. These relationships are somewhat reduced, but persist at statistically significant levels, when socio-demographic background variables are held constant. We then discuss the implications of our results for theory and method in the social indicators field.