Abstract
Actually, crossing Alex’s scientific life corresponded also to crossing the renewed worldwide debate on the role of social indicators in promoting the wellbeing of individual and nations. My contribution to this collection re-considers some reflections I already wrote on measuring progress of societies.
Since several decades, many researchers all over the world have been continuously working on defining concepts and measures able to measure and monitor the wellbeing of nations.
Actually what emerges clearly is that the change of paradigm introduces several methodological implications in identifying indicators. Actually, monitoring wellbeing through indicators introduces some issues representing at the same time a challenge (given by the complexity), a need (represented by the relativization) and a risk (given by the over-reductionism).
This work, fruit of previous reflections, aims at clarifying and disentangling these issues by remarking that the key allowing for the proper identification of new measures lies in the players’ (statisticians, researchers, analysts, policy makers, and so on) capacity and awareness in considering complexity, avoiding over-reductionism and investigating relativization.
This contribution to this collection represents actually a small sign of tribute from my side to Alex.
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Notes
- 1.
Eudaimonia or eudaemonia or eudemonia, is a Greek word commonly translated as “human flourishing”, considered as an accurate translation.
- 2.
A possible multidimensional conceptual definition could be the following: A good and healthy society is that in which each individual has the possibility to participate in the community life, develop skills, abilities, capabilities and independency, adequately choose and control his/her own life, be treated with respect in a healthy and safe environment and by respecting the opportunities of future generations.
- 3.
According to some authors, like Veenhoven, affects’ determinants are universal and consequently not produced by individual response-styles or cultural differences.
- 4.
One of the first attempts aimed at identifying the more relevant life domains is Andrews and Withey’s study (1976). By admitting that individual concerns can be infinite, they focus on those domains which seem to be relevant and meaningful for individuals and their QoL. Different studies identify different lists of domains, even very different from each other (e.g., Extended Satisfaction with life scale, Allison et al. 1991).
- 5.
Particular attention should be devoted to the term “happiness”, which assumes different meanings according to different authors. Many scholars refer “happiness” to the affective component of subjective well-being (Nuvolati 2002; Diener et al. 2008). Others consider happiness as a synonymous of life satisfaction Veenhoven (1994).
Besides the different conceptual views, the statistical evidences can tell different stories. The highest rank correlation value between “level of satisfaction with life as a whole” and “level of happiness” by country in round 4 of the European Social Survey data is 0.6 (registered for the United Kingdom sample), revealing not only that the two components are not coinciding but also that a linguistic problem underlies the definition of happiness.
Just an example concerning that. “Happiness” (one of the dimensions of the subjective wellbeing) is translated in Italian “felicità”. Actually, if we look at the linguistic roots of them we could realize that they are dealing with two different worlds, since the former comes from “to happen” and latter from the Latin “felix” which can be translated as “chance”.
In the rest of this work this definition of subjective wellbeing will be adopted, in which happiness represents just one of the aspects (the positive affect).
- 6.
For example, any attempt aimed at improving connections between cities (in terms of travelling time) faces limits. Time spent to go from one city to another can be reduced thanks to new technologies and improvements in territorial structures. However, the commuting time that can be reduced should be balanced with the capitals (such as the territory) that need to be consumed and sacrificed for that reduction. In other words, the question is: what is the price to be paid in order to reduce the commuting time by a few minutes? Perhaps the technological efforts could be oriented towards how to reduce the amount of people that need to commute each day.
- 7.
According to the World Bank’s four-capital approach, for example, sustainable development should enhance and preserve social, human, produced and natural capital of present generations and provide future generations with them.
- 8.
Michalos identified 15 different issues related to the selection of social, economic, and environmental indicators. As Michalos asserts, these issues, are collectively yielded over 200,000 possible combinations (Sirgy et al. 2006).
- 9.
Anand and Sen (1997), arguing that the conglomerative and deprivational perspectives are not substitutes for each other, proposed a complementary approach. The adoption of the complementary approach allows us to construct indices of social and economic well-being that should reflect the aggregated and disaggregated approaches. According to this methodology, conglomerative and deprivational indices should be constructed separately side-by-side along the lines of the United Nations Development Programme indicators (Sharpe and Salzman 2004).
- 10.
The dichotomy quality/quantity introduced here refers to the technical expression of indicators and not to their meaning.
- 11.
The use of benchmarks plays an important role in the ambit of a program development. Used in combination with the program objectives they provide the basis for program accountability.
- 12.
A reference point can be actually represented by a reference group (e.g., percentage of people with a high level of satisfaction with life as a whole).
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Maggino, F. (2016). Challenges, Needs and Risks in Defining Wellbeing Indicators. In: Maggino, F. (eds) A Life Devoted to Quality of Life. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 60. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20568-7_13
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