Quality of Life in Europe: An Illustrative Report

This report begins the task of providing both a descriptive benchmark for the monitoring programme and an analytical understanding of the processes that shape these patterns. The relatively short chapters in this report demonstrate content, analysis and a possible reporting style, but they do not attempt to strongly relate data to the policy agenda: that will be an important element of future reporting. As such, the first chapter undertakes purely descriptive monitoring, taking indicators from the Foundations database on living conditions and quality of life, and describes trends over time. Given unlimited space it would be useful to give a descriptive overview of all of the indicators in the database, but in reality this is not practical. The focus is on the specific theme of economic resources, itself the focus of one domain, but which also links all of the domains together. The conceptual framework identified economic resources as a central life domain alongside health status and family life. As well as allocating greater space to the first section on economic resources, subsequent sections will use an individual or households position in the income distribution, or their poverty status, as a prism through which to disaggregate the indicators of other domains. The following chapters adopt a more analytical stance and illustrate the utility of more indepth analysis for understanding the relationship between different domains, how causal processes move over time and the importance of having measures of both subjective perceptions and objective conditions.The second chapter presents an analysis of the correlation between income poverty, lifestyle deprivation and economic strain. This illustrates the importance of seeing current living standards as the result of a process of accumulation and erosion of resources over time and the relationship between objective and subjective measurements. Chapter 3 moves onto the relationship between subjective health status and health care experiences and their connection to the persons characteristics and context. Chapter 4 examines cross-country measures of global subjective well-being and how these are structured, before turning to an analysis of time use and its implications for work-life balance and social participation in chapter 5. The statistics used in this report are taken from the most recent surveys available through the Foundations own research and from Eurostat.