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This section has reviewed some important issues relating to the monitoring of living conditions and quality of life, and it is worth briefly summarising the key conclusions.

First, we saw that some lessons could be learned from recent research on poverty and deprivation. This highlighted in particular the role played by the dynamics of income and labour force participation over time, and the accumulation and erosion of resources over a lengthy period. The more one focuses on these long-term processes rather than on a simple snapshot of current circumstances, the more one sees a greater social structuring of disadvantage. This also brings out the importance of taking collective as well as individual resources into account – especially provision of public goods in the form of health care, for example – in seeking to capture and understand the evolution of living standards.

Our discussion of the use of subjective as opposed to objective indicators – itself a somewhat arbitrary dichotomy – then showed that focusing entirely on one or the other was unhelpful. Simply tracking overall levels of satisfaction on their own is unlikely to be particularly informative, but the subjective experience of objective circumstances is an important component of quality of life. A

focus on the relationship between reported satisfaction levels and objective resources and conditions, on the other hand, will facilitate the development of a deeper understanding of how people come to evaluate their work, family and community life and the interrelationships between them, and therefore of the determinants of quality of life.

The identification and categorisation of distinct domains is an important stage in the measurement of key aspects of living conditions and quality of life. Describing a number of examples of commonly adopted categorisations served to reveal that they have much in common, even when beginning from somewhat different conceptual starting points, and that appropriateness for the purpose at hand is a key criterion.

The issue of whether quality of life across various dimensions should be summarised in a single measure was also considered. Again, this may depend on the purpose at hand: for the Foundation’s monitoring of living conditions and quality of life, we argued strongly that more is to be lost than gained by such aggregation, with much of the interest and value of the exercise lying in the tracking and understanding the multidimensional nature of quality of life. In the same vein, it was emphasised that such monitoring must seek to encompass available data from various sources and carefully put in context the trends and developments revealed in key features of the societies in which they occur.

Having highlighted the importance of context, we conclude this section by reflecting on the reasons why there has been an upsurge in interest in social reporting and in monitoring living conditions and quality of life, not just in the EU but also in various countries and international organisations – as exemplified by the recent New Zealand social report and the OECD social indicators publications already described. The OECD itself put considerable effort into the development of social indicators in the 1970s, only to see that activity run into the sand. This reflected a widespread loss of interest in social monitoring in the face of increased unemployment, slow economic growth and a focus on macroeconomic performance – just as the high level of interest in social reporting in the 1960s and 1970s arose in the context of a prolonged period (since the 1940s) of exceptional economic growth in the industrialised world.

The context in which renewed interest in social reporting is now being seen is certainly one of improved economic performance in the 1990s and into the new century, but without the complacency about economic growth that can, with hindsight, be seen as prevailing towards the end of the ‘Golden Age’ following World War II. Instead, both in an EU context and more broadly, it seems to be a response to the recognition that sustaining reasonable levels of growth will remain a major challenge, given technological and other changes; that traditional growth promotion on its own may both fail to meet social objectives and be environmentally unsustainable; and that social policy, broadly conceived, has a vital role to play in facilitating growth and meeting social goals. So it is precisely because the easy assumptions about sustaining economic growth and what that achieves have been undermined, that social reporting has come to prominence once more. However, it must then be seen to make a serious contribution to tackling the concerns of policy- makers and the public, if that interest is to be maintained. This brings us back to our distinction between descriptive and analytical monitoring: simply tracking social change or social progress will not suffice; it is only if monitoring makes a serious contribution to understanding, and thus to promoting social progress, that it will ultimately be seen as valuable.

We now address directly the questions which the foregoing discussion has been intended to inform: what conceptual framework should be adopted in the Foundation’s monitoring activity in the area of living conditions and quality of life, and what kind of monitoring should it aim to achieve? In this chapter we first set out the general conceptual orientation proposed, then present the conceptual framework, and follow that with an outline of the analytical goals the exercise should aim to achieve. Finally we discuss the next stages in the overall process within which this developmental report fits.