Quality of Life is Not Always Relative

Quality of life can be a very tricky concept to measure, and it is common for people to underestimate the quality of life of certain groups. For example, disabled adults.

Back in 1993, John Bach and Denise Campagnolo of The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey did a quality of life study on ventilator-assisted people. They measured quality of life for this group using a standardized scale and as a comparison also measured quality of life for their caregivers. Perhaps most importantly, they asked the caregivers to rate quality of life for the people they cared for.

The test showed two important things: [1] both the people who were ventilator assisted and their caregivers rated the quality of their own lives about the same. [2] Caregivers rated the quality of the lives of the people that they cared for much lower than those people rated their own lives.

This study shows that people in general and disability service providers in particular cannot judge the quality of anyone else's life. This judgment must always be made by the individual for herself or himself.

An interesting observation of this study is the lesser role of life events in determining quality of life than one might intuitively think. If you believed that life events were the dominant factor in quality of life then you would think that ventilator-assisted people would rank much lower than those presumably-healthy individuals proving them care. But as we see from the study this is not the case.

A secondary observation of the results is that you have to be careful about judging other people's happiness levels by their observable life events. Similarly, others are equally incapable about judging your level of happiness by simply looking at your observable life events. Even though researchers have been able to draw a number of conclusions about what does and does not make people generally happy, the application of these observations does not apply at the individual level. Maybe this is the reason why it is so annoying whenever someone tells how how we should be feeling about something or treat us that way.