Quality of Life As Local-Global Reflection

The changing world exacerbates so many contradictions of economic, social and environmental issues what affects the quality of life of the inhabitants of modern cities and villages. This kind of problem is especially perceptible for the most vulnerable socio-economically disadvantaged groups such as young people and the elderly.

Using this approach, according to which a QoL refers to a comprehensive well-being, that takes into account the various aspects of human life, the Department of Sociology of Russian State University for the Humanities conducted research using questionnaires in October 2012 and September 2013. It represented the adult population and distinguished four main studying groups: youth, senior citizens, urban and rural population of working age. 

In the result, we obtained not only an idea of the self-perception of different socio-demografic groups representatives in relation to the assessment of individual aspects of life (personal economic status, social status, personal security, availability of education, social welfare and medical services, maternal and child welfare, employment, leisure etc.), but also identified mechanisms to increase self-perseption of QoL.

The first one (objective) defines QoL as a result of combinations of different statistics. The second model is based on affirmation that the real sense of QoL is reflected in subjective feelings of individuals, which are formed on the basis of system developments level of individual, his life experience, emotional status, etc. The objective indicators (measures) include following main groups: natural, economic and social. Subjective ones are represented by life satisfaction, the feeling of happiness and depression, social support, personal competence, anxiety, stress, etc. This non-linearal relation between the objective and subjective indicators allows to find a paradoxicalness of public consciousness and offers an original mechanisms to overcome the negative trend in QoL. 

All these aspects will be considered as Local-Global reflection.