ABSTRACT
‘Quality of life’ concerns an individual's or a group's state of well-being, defined as the ‘degree to which the needs and wants of a population are being met’ (Johnston 1994: 568). From the outset, this focus on wants as well as needs indicates how any one person's understanding of what constitutes the quality of life will be both individually and socially defined through being specific to a given society or subdivision of that society. As an idea that is not, therefore, some kind of objective absolute, defining the key features of a high quality of life can be subject to considerable debate and dispute. For example, the issues defining quality of life that feature most prominently in this chapter may well be quite different from those that would be picked up by authors from a different social and/or cultural tradition.
