ABSTRACT
From prehistory to modern life, and (within the latter) from highly developed welfare states to the developing societies where life is too often nasty, brutish, and short, on its face the empirical indicator of QOL applies universally to the spectrum of human conditions as a framework for measuring and evaluating how and how well people live. However, its conceptualization and expression, at least in the form of the specific term, “quality of life,” is of a far more recent vintage. A detailed history of the term’s diffusion in everyday discourse is difficult to assemble, but a suggestive picture can be drawn from a Google Book Search of the exact phrase “quality of life” in popular books and magazines, scholarly journals, and governmental reports; see Table 2.1.1
Throughout the twentieth century, “quality of life” appeared most frequently in scholarly works-particularly in the fields of education, psychology, and (by mid-century) sociology-and philosophical and religious essays. Early in the century, for instance, American educational reformer John Dewey (1916) wrote in his Democracy and Education,
To say that education is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group.
