A central thrust of recent research and practice in monitoring living standards and quality of life is that it is essential to measure living conditions and resources across a variety of dimensions, rather than simply to focus on income, for example. This raises the obvious question: what are the most important areas of life to distinguish and cover? The answer, of course, will depend on the purpose at hand, but it is useful to look here at some commonly adopted categorisations and coverage to illustrate both commonalities and differences in approach. We then use this as a basis for presenting the approach we regard as most suitable for present purposes.
We saw in Chapter 1 that the Swedish welfare tradition, seeking to measure ‘levels of living’, is particularly highly developed in terms of empirical application and thus provides a useful point of departure. The nine areas or dimensions generally distinguished in the Swedish approach are shown in Table 1 on the facing page. While these are grounded in a particular conceptual perspective, Erikson (1993) points out in discussing the Swedish approach, that exercises adopting rather different conceptual starting points generally arrive at rather similar categorisations of areas. This is brought out in the table by also showing the domains distinguished in some other regular national and cross-national reporting activities. These are the German ‘System of social accounts’, which distinguishes 14 life domains; the annual ‘Social trends’ publication produced by the UK Office for National Statistics which distinguishes 12 areas; and New Zealand which has just produced its first official social report and distinguishes nine domains.
We see that all four examples distinguish as domains the areas of health, the labour market, education, income, and security. Housing, family, social relationships/connectedness/participation, and the environment are also widely covered while transport is distinguished in the UK and German examples. There are also some interesting variations, though, with the Swedish tradition, for example, including political resources, the German ‘social accounts’ distinguishing leisure and media consumption, and the New Zealand social report having domains covering ‘human rights’ and ‘culture and identity’.
Table 1: Examples of domains distinguished in social monitoring
Swedish welfare tradition German social accounts UK social trends New Zealand social report
Health and access to health care Health Health Health
Employment and working Labour market and working Labour market Paid work conditions conditions
Economic resources, consumer Income and income distribution Income and wealth Economic standard of living protection
Knowledge and access to Education Education and training Knowledge and skills education
Family and social relationships/ Households and families Integration
Housing and local amenities Housing Housing
Security of life and property Public safety and crime Crime and justice Safety and security Recreation and culture Leisure and media consumption
Political resources
The environment Environment The environment
Transportation Transportation Consumption and supply Expenditure
Participation Lifestyles and participation Social connectedness Socio-economic status
Population
Human rights Culture, identity
The definition of domains in social reporting in an EU context is among the issues addressed in the EuReporting project. Their ‘European system of social indicators’ covers the 13 distinct life domains or modules set out in Table 2 (see for example Noll, 2000). Like the German ‘System of social accounts’, the EuReporting approach also has an additional domain for ‘total life situation’. Table 2: Domains in EuReporting project’s European system of social indicators
Domains adopted by EuReporting project
Population
Household and family Housing
Transport
Leisure, media and culture
Social and political participation and integration Education and vocational training
Labour market and working conditions Income, standard of living, consumption patterns Health
Environment Social security Public safety and crime
The extensive literature analysing quality of life from a life satisfaction/subjective perspective provides another useful point of reference. Cummins (1996), in what he described as an attempt to order chaos, undertook an analysis of 173 different domain names used in such studies. He concluded that most of these could be encompassed under seven domain headings: relationships with family and friends, emotional well-being, material well-being, health, work and productive activity, feeling part of one’s local community, and personal safety. Hagerty et al (2001) argue that
other ‘supplementary domains’ may be important to particular populations or in particular contexts. For example, they suggest that leisure may be of particular interest in developed countries, and ‘political participation’ may be regarded as important in countries that have only recently adopted political institutions.
The fact that different categorisations have been used in different countries and contexts arises both because what is appropriate depends on the purpose at hand and the underlying conceptual framework, and because judgments may differ across societies and over time about what areas and issues are most salient. To take just one example of why the conceptual framework is critically important: treating ‘emotional well-being’ as a distinct and important domain makes sense from a perspective focused on life satisfaction, but would be quite out of place in the Swedish approach given its focus on level of living. An example of how the salience of particular areas can vary is the increasing importance now widely assigned to the environment. Another is the emergence, more recently, of social capital as a focus of attention. The best approach to adopt in distinguishing domains for the purpose of the Foundation’s activities, is among the issues addressed in the next section.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that time use is increasingly coming to be seen as an important aspect of quality of life. Garhammer (2000), for example, argues that more and more, citizens in advanced industrialised societies see having some time ‘for themselves’, and for leisure activities in particular, as very important. Overwork and the feeling of stress due to constant time pressure, are commonly reported. There are, however, marked differences across societies in this respect, as well as within societies, for example, between men and women.
How can this be captured in the type of domain categorisations discussed here? Rather than treating time use as a distinct domain in itself or seeing it primarily in the context of the domain ‘leisure activity’, for example, it appears preferable to see it as (one example of) a cross-cutting dimension which is central to understanding, for example, the relationship between the domains of work and family life, or between work, family, leisure activities and social participation. Indeed, we go on to emphasise its importance, seen in this light, in the next section.