Quality of life

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About

Quality of life underscores the importance of physical, mental, social and emotional health throughout the life course. Quality of life reflects internal conditions, such as perceived health, life satisfaction and self-esteem. Quality of life also includes external aspects that enable people to live well, such as environmental and housing quality and community safety. Quality of life data tell us how people assess their overall well-being. Self-assessed health correlates with actual health outcomes. Health-related quality of life focuses on how a person’s health impacts their ability to live a full life.

Relationship to health and equity

Everyone, regardless of their identities, deserves a good quality of life. It is important to understand the perceived physical, mental, social, economic and spiritual health of different communities so we can identify patterns over time and inequities between groups. We can also identify laws and policies, institutional practices, and worldviews, culture and norms that impact quality of life and contribute to equitable outcomes. Relationships, education, work environment, wealth, a sense of safety, autonomy in decision-making, and social belonging all feed into quality of life. Generational trauma may also impact quality of life. Government institutions and communities all have a role to play in improving everyone’s quality of life.

Relationship to systems and structures

Many things that impact a person’s quality of life are rooted in both societal and individual histories, culture and worldviews. External conditions, including how laws and policies are enforced, contribute to quality of life. For example, the origin of current policing practices in slave patrols and Jim Crow laws means that communities of color and Indigenous communities may experience disproportionate fear of the police.

Economic security contributes to quality of life, but work safety is another. For example, a migrant farm worker might earn more money than they could in their native country, but their quality of life may be low if they cannot make decisions to protect themselves from pesticides or heat. Their ability to protect themselves has been limited by lax enforcement of rules around breaks and use of protective equipment combined with worldviews that value corporate farm ownership and profit over safety. Leadership and collective action by migrant farmworkers throughout the 20th century have improved conditions, most recently with new national heat standards for outdoor workers and new protections against wage theft and labor trafficking for the temporary guest workers program.

Additional Reading

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