QUALITY OF LIFE RESEARCH AND MONITORING IN EU

COUNTRIES AND IN THE CANDIDATE COUNTRIES1

Ioan Mărginean
Starting with 2001, quality of life became of a major, formal interest
within the EU. More precisely, the European Foundation for the Improvement
of the Life and Working Conditions, with headquarters in Dublin, the Republic
of Ireland, started a program for quality of life survey and monitoring
throughout 2001-2004. The foundation, established in 1975 as an autonomous
EU body, surveyed various aspects of the quality of life even before the onset of
the mentioned program, but this time we deal with a new, distinct and
comprehensive approach of the quality of life, which also approaches elements
already included in previous surveys of the conditions of life. It is noteworthy
that the prestigious institution organizes debates periodically and publishes
reports on subjects of conditions of life and working, industrial relationships, the
health of working, environmental protection, etc., within which representatives
of the government and the EU, of employer and union organizations join with
scientific researchers and with other specialists of the approached domains. In
this endeavour, the organization is supported by a special commission, whose
members provide advice on the design and implementation of the research
projects for each main area of study, monitor the projects, discuss and evaluate
the results of these activities and decide on the publishing and dissemination of
the results.
A distinct research group has been established for the field of the
quality of life, as well as a network of specialists from the candidate countries.
So far, the experts met in two working sessions (at Budapest, in November 2003
and at Warsaw, in June 2003) and discussed the methodology and instruments
of the quality of life survey that was conducted this summer in 28 countries. The
reports of a 2001 survey of the conditions of living were also discussed.
Before presenting some elements of quality of life survey and
monitoring, I will present a particular achievement of the foundation, which
precedes and prepares the quality of life survey. I mean the organization of a
series of three surveys of the working conditions in the EU countries, in
1990/1991; 1995/1996 and in 2000. The survey collected data on the work force
structure, on the type of work, on the physical and psychosocial factors of the
work, on the organization and duration of work, on employee information and
consultation, etc.
Some of the results of the survey (Pascal Paoli and Damien Merllie –
Third European Survey on working conditions 2000, EFILWC, 2001) provide
valuable information on the state of the surveyed field. For instance, overall EU,
83.4% of the work force has the statute of employee, two percent more than
during the previous decade, although the general idea is that the “future of work
is self employing”. Under the conditions of an unfavourable economic
environment, however, the proportion of self employed decreased, during the
past decade, from 19 to 17%. The differences between the EU countries in the
share of employed persons within the overall work force are quite large, ranging
from 94% in Denmark, 93% in the Netherlands, 75-76% in Portugal, Italy and

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Calitatea Vieţii (Quality of Life: A Journal of Social Policy), XIV, nr.3-4, 2003, p.431-
435, Bucharest, Romania
Spain, to 56% in Greece. As it can be noticed, the lower proportion of
employees within the overall work force appears in the less economically
developed EU member states, where the sector of agriculture is larger.
According to the type of property, overall countries, 69% of the work
force works in the private sector: Spain 76%, Italy 75%, the Netherlands 74%,
Ireland 50% and Greece 40%.
The average length of the working week, during March-April 2000,
was 38.2 hours for the industrial workers and the self employed and 36.7 hours
for overall employees.
The economic sector employing the largest share of the work force
(65%) is the sector of services, of which, trading 15%, real estate and business
activities 8%, public administration 8%, transportation and communications 6%
each, financial intermediation 5%, hotels and restaurants 4%.
The information on the work-related risks increased from 71% in
1995 to 76% in 2000.
The physical violence at the working place was claimed by 2% of
the employees, while 9% of the employees claim intimidation (10% women
and 7% men), with the highest values in Finland, the Netherlands and the Great
Britain (14-15% of the workers). The areas where the violence on workers occur
the most often are administration and the public order (reported by 14% of the
workers). Sexual harassment was reported by 2% of the employees (4%
women and 2% men), with high values in the Northern countries. The gender
and ethnic discrimination too, reported rather low values (2-3%).
With this program of quality of life research and monitoring in
Europe the foundation entered a new stage of development. The significance
of this new stage resides, before all, in including the concern for the quality
of life on the EU agenda, both as research approach and as objective of
public policy. The paper Monitoring Quality of Life in Europe (T. Fahey et al,
Luxembourg, 2003), states very clearly these two targets, beginning with the
Foreword of the Director, Raymond Pierre Bodin and of the Deputy Director,
Willy Buschak. On the one hand, the paper raises the problem of a more
comprehensive type of social research in relation with the survey on the
conditions of living or on the income and economic standard. On the other hand,
new elements emerge, which are challenges for the public policies, such as the
social exclusion and population ageing, or the shift in the family structure and
roles. All these bear an impact on the every day life and on the people, families,
communities and the community, pushing the issue of the quality of life as a
priority in the public political debate, amplified by the onset of the process of
adhesion of new members to the EU.
In order to answer adequately to the mentioned challenges, it was
considered necessary to pay attention to the development of a conception and
approach of the research of the conditions of life and of the quality of life close
to the mission of the foundation and to the requirements of the decision-makers
in the field of public policies, of the social partners, mainly at EU level. Thus,
the survey related the research of the conditions of life and of the quality of life
to the type of occupation, organization and conditions of work, to the
modernization of protection and social services. The authors decided on the, as
comprehensive as possible, conception on the quality of life started by the
papers of the 7th decade of the past century.
 The program we are discussing here supports, on an European scale,
the approach of the quality of life with the best scientific background produced
so far, rejecting the various elaborations that diminish the significance of the
quality of life paradigm, reducing it to some conditions of life (income, standard
of living), or to its subjective dimension of researching the perception and
satisfaction provided by the conditions of living, possibly by limiting it to the
analyses of the surveys on happiness. Undoubtedly, all these aspects have value
for quality of life research, but are not enough. In the mentioned program, in a
manner that we consider fully funded, the quality of life refers to all the aspects
of individual welfare within the society. Hence, the necessity to develop a new
set of relevant objective and subjective indicators for research, monitoring
and reporting.
The conditions of life are the central element for the improvement of
the quality of life, because people depend on them to achieve their targets. They
can be achieved under the conditions imposed by the economic sustainability
and by observing the rights and needs of the others, in a given institutional and
policy environment, within a given community and society context.
By researching the quality of life, the authors consider the
resources and opportunities existing in the society, as well as the conditions
of life required for the access to resources and opportunities. This involves
both individual and collective resources: education, health care, dwelling and
social services, considered as essential for the quality of life, the opportunities
open to the population and the choices and their results measured by objective
and subjective indicators. Such an approach of the quality of life is supported by
the particular significance of the “movement of the social indicators” initiated in
the paper Social Indicators (Ed. R. Bauer, 1966), in the initiatives of the US
government for the definition of the national objectives (Kennedy-Johnson
administration (1960-1964), in the Social reports or in various US and European
research programs, the most significant of which being the one initiated by the
Berlin Institute for Social Research (Euromodul, “Quality of Life” Journal,
2002, nr.1-4).
As quality of life researcher I am glad to say that the Bucharest
Institute for Quality of Life too, adopted such a comprehensive approach of the
subject of discussion, through the approaches of assimilation and development
of the basal paradigm mentioned earlier, presented in detail by Prof. C. Zamfir
and his collaborators, starting with the paper “Indicators and sources of quality
of life variation”, Political Press, 1984, and developed after 1990 by special
surveys required y the knowledge of some important aspects of the Romanian
society.
By this approach, the subject of the quality of life is connected to many areas of
utmost interest, such as welfare, human development, social capital, quality of
the society, social exclusion/inclusion. This is not just about results, because
they are affected by the different options of the people, but also about the
capacity of collecting them, about the existing opportunities. However, in
this very fact we notice a major difficulty which the research must cope with,
namely the connection of the resources to the results. The cited paper presents
several solutions to this problem, none of them fully satisfactory, such as the
pattern of surveying the population’s evaluations which started in the early days
of existence of the quality of life paradigm, or the more recent developments
such as that of A.Sen, laureate of the Nobel Prize for economy, concerning
the functionings (those things that a person manages to do and obtain: native
endowment, health state, self esteem, social integration, etc.) and
capabilities (alternative combinations of the functionalities), considered as
either too limited, or too abstract; the authors enhance the option for the
quality of life research through an, as comprehensive as possible, system of
subjective and objective indicators.
In agreement with the adopted position, quality of life monitoring
presumes focusing not just on results and on subjective assessments, but
also on resources and other constraints from the different areas where the
people act. This approach has potentiality for displaying the changes within
the society as well as the causal processes, the trends and future changes.
From this perspective, the focus on the development of a complex
set of criteria for indicators selection is not incidental: significance for
citizens’ quality of life; consensus on what the achievement of a progress in
the social field means; the capacity to show the level and the change; how
much the social results affect the European political agenda; how much they
represent a concern for the different levels of the public policy; how much
the priorities of the foundation reflect the quality of the measurement of the
social result; how much adequate is the social result to the research and
monitoring; how much adequate is it for the comparative analyses.
Indeed, the viability of the quality of life paradigm is given by the
set of objective and subjective social indicators, by overlapping the states of
fact that characterize the life of the population on a process of assessment
and self assessment (I. Mărginean., A. Bălaşa, coord., “Quality of life in
Romania”, Bucharest, Expert Press, 2002).
Finally, we have, though, an observation on the practice of using,
based on cost reasoning, the so-called random route sampling design, which
is at the brink of acceptability from the perspective of the probabilistic
sampling criteria. I consider it to be a non-probabilistic method, since no
microcensus is conducted beforehand in the area. Correlated to the rather
small size of the country samples, despite all the precautions on the field
data pondering, data comparability by country may be affected more or less
seriously. A more rigorous method of sampling would have been better,
maybe even the probabilistic stratified sampling, so as to increase the
accuracy of the statistical assessments and, implicitly, of the country
hierarchies by a given criteria.
We will revert to this program, after the publishing of the results
of the empirical research in the summer of 2003, on the quality of life in the
28 UE member states and candidate countries, both for the value of the
information as comparison, and for the support of social policies of wide
interest, which those result refer to, which will bring them to the foremost
public attention.