ABSTRACT
There is considerable interest in the concept of quality of life among nurses, medical practitioners, researchers, health economists, and many other groups who work in and around the health services. Their interest reflects more general debates about the meaning and relevance of quality of life in fields as diverse as medical ethics, where the concept is related to arguments about euthanasia and abortion; environmental ethics; and moral issues in law such as crime and punishment. Politicians also frequently refer to the effect that their policies will have on the quality of the lives of their constituents and the nation at large. It is surprising that such a widely used concept, to which reference is made in the literature of so many academic disciplines, should be difficult to define in a satisfactory way; but the assumption with which this book begins is that the meaning of quality of life is vague. Indeed, many researchers in the field do not bother to discuss its meaning at all. In my view, the situation that exists today is similar to that described by McCall in 1980. McCall suggested that far from knowing what quality of life is, we do not even know what category of thing it is. He suggested that researchers are unable to decide whether it is a state of mind or a state of society, and are unclear as to whether its definition varies from person to person, from culture to culture, and from place to place. He also notes important differences of opinion about whether, and how, quality of life can be measured.
