A review of quality of life (QOL) assessments and indicators: Towards a "QOL-Climate" assessment framework

Abstract

Quality of life (QOL), although a complex and amorphous concept, is a term that warrants attention, especially in discussions on issues that touch on the impacts of climate change and variability. Based on the principles of RepOrting standards for Systematic Evidence Synthesis, we present a systematic review aimed at gaining insights into the conceptualization and methodological construct of previous studies regarding QOL and QOL-related indexes. We find that (i) QOL assessments vary in terms of conceptual foundations, dimensions, indicators, and units of analysis, (ii) social indicators are consistently used across assessments, (iii) most assessments consider indicators that pertain to the livability of the environment, and (iv) QOL can be based on objective indicators and/or subjective well-being, and on a composite index or unaggregated dimensions and indicators. However, we also find that QOL assessments remain poorly connected with climate-related issues, an important research gap. Our proposed "QOL-Climate" assessment framework, designed to capture the social-ecological impacts of climate change and variability, can potentially help fill this gap.

Keywords: Climate change; QOL; Quality of life; Social indicators; Vulnerability; Well-being.

Fig. 1

Flowchart of the review. This diagram is based on ROSES (Haddaway et al. , , ; www.roses-reporting.com)

Fig. 2

Temporal trends in article publications regarding QOL (2000–2017). a Based on the 3521 articles resulting from all research areas; and b Based on the 178 articles resulting from the selected research areas. Table S1 lists all the research areas and those selected

Fig. 3

Total occurrence and network of authors’ keywords based on the 178 articles (2000–2017). Fractional counting was used, which means that the weight of a link was fractionalized. For example, if a keyword co-occurs with five other keywords, each of the five keywords has a weight of 0.2 (1/5). For these 178 articles, a threshold of 2 was applied (i.e., the minimum number of occurrences for each keyword), resulting in a total of 50 keywords. The result for the 3251 articles is presented in Fig. S1

Fig. 4

Classification of the references reviewed (19 articles [1–19] and 9 indexes [20–28]) based on their respective indicators plotted according to the triple bottom line (fulfillers of human needs). The figure also shows the articles and indexes that explicitly considered subjective well-being (satisfaction, happiness, fulfillment, welfare, etc.) in their respective frameworks and assessments. The numbers correspond to the numbers under the column heading “No.” in Tables 3, S2 and S3, and those in Fig. 5

Fig. 5

Classification of the references reviewed (19 articles [1–19] and 9 indexes [20–28]), plotted across the four quadrants of QOL based on their respective indicators. The numbers correspond to the numbers in Fig. 4 and to the numbers under the column heading “No.” in Tables 3, S2 and S3

Fig. 6

A generalized and simplified flowchart for deriving an overall composite index based on hierarchical aggregation. Of the references reviewed, 86% derived an overall composite index, and 58% of these used unequal weights in the aggregation of their dimensions (see Tables 3 and S2). The dotted line between the dimension boxes and the overall composite index box indicates that not all of the references reviewed derived an overall composite index. Here, dimensions also refer to domains, components or their equivalent. In some cases, sub-indicators, called variables in the figure, were also used (e.g., Royuela et al. 2003)

Fig. 7

The “QOL-Climate” assessment framework: a general framework for assessing quality of life, considering the social-ecological impacts of climate change and variability. Key references used in the development of this framework include IPCC’s AR5 on climate-related issues, Ostrom (2009) on the social-ecological system paradigm, Costanza et al. (2007) on the integrative definition of QOL, Elkington (1994, 1997) on the triple bottom line, www.forumforthefuture.org on the five capitals, and www.pik-potsdam.de on impact chain analysis. Also included are references reviewed for some examples of indicators, and the syntheses in this review for the overall structure of the diagram