Defining quality of life: A wild-goose chase?

Abstract

In the last decades there has been a growing interest towards the concept of "Quality of Life" (QoL), not only in the bio-medical field, but also in other areas, such as sociology, psychology, economics, philosophy, architecture, journalism, politics, environment, sports, recreation, advertisements. Nevertheless QoL does turn out to be an ambiguous and elusive concept -a precise, clear and shared definition appears to be a long way off. In this article an analysis of how QoL is interpreted and defined in various scientific articles published in the last two decades, is offered. In addition, an illustration of how widespread the use of this concept is in different fields of knowledge, the difficulties in reaching a shared understanding of QoL, the problems involved in stating clearly the construct, and a presentation of some of its conceptualizations, are provided. The importance of subjectivity in the definition of what QoL is, emerges as a key aspect. This personal and subjective dimension could be the starting point for a more thorough and holistic understanding of this concept, in which standardized sets of valid, reliable and evidence-based measures of, e.g., psychological and spiritual dimensions, are encompassed in the person's quality of life evaluation.

Return to sport matters—longer‐term quality of life after ACL reconstruction in people with knee difficulties

“…Quality of life has been defined by the World Health Organisation as “an individual's perceptions of their position in life taken in the context of the culture and value systems where they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns” (The World Health Organization Group ). One aspect of QOL is the concept of health‐related QOL (Barcaccia et al., ), which refers to the discordance between an individual's health expectations or desires, and their current health experience (Carr et al., ). For this research, we have used the term “knee‐related QOL” to refer to the degree that an individual's QOL is impacted by knee‐related factors.…”

Predictors of quality of life for chronic stroke survivors in relation to cultural differences: a literature review

“…These factors may in turn be adjusted and could mean different things to people with different cultural backgrounds . In this respect, culture is an important dimension that cannot be disregarded when evaluating QoL . To our knowledge, no studies have been published to explore the relationship between QoL and culture in stroke survivors.…”

Selection of a quality of life instrument for polio survivors in Northwest Nigeria

“…Thus, the KQ and QP could not meet the criteria for content suitability and adequate psychometric properties respectively. QoL is an elusive construct and lacks a definitive framework for conceptualization and measurement [ 6 ]. This explains why various instruments are typically employed in polio literature.…”