ABSTRACT
At the beginning of We Can Speak For Ourselves, their remarkable early book on self-advocacy, Williams and Shoultz (1982) quoted John Lennon’s sentiment that we may be dreamers, but we’re not the only ones. They went on to present the aims and activities of people with intellectual disabilities who were working to create a better life for themselves and their friends. Following their lead, one could argue that the raison d’être of services, supports, and organizations established on behalf of those with disabilities should be to improve quality of life. It was thus not long before researchers took seriously the challenge to develop approaches to defining, measuring, and understanding quality of life (Keith, Schalock and Hoffman, 1986; Landesman, 1986). Consequently, Schalock (1990) was right when he predicted that quality of life would be ‘the issue’ of the 1990s. Research on quality of life virtually exploded during that decade, leading Cummins (1995) to note the existence of more than 100 definitions of the concept. By the same year, more than 1,000 measures of quality of life had found their way into the research literature (Hughes, Hwang, Kim, Eisenman and Killian, 1995). And in the three-year period 1992-1995 researchers produced 1,400 publications on quality of life (Antaki and Rapley, 1996). Subsequently, Schalock and Verdugo (2002) reported that well over 20,000 articles were published in the years since 1985 with the term ‘quality of life’ in their titles. Despite (or perhaps because of) this wealth of work on the topic, at the dawn of the new millennium a singular definition of quality of life continued to elude investigators (Hensel, 2001).
