Quality of life (QOL) means a good life and we believe that a good life is the same as living a life with a high quality. This may seem evident, but it is necessary to make such a simple clarification, because medical jargon often uses very narrow concepts of the quality of life (for example, side effect profiles). Medical advertisements often depict the quality of life as one factor among many, on a par with other improvements that a certain medical product promises. In this work, the quality of life belongs on the highest, most common level of life. All great religions and philosophies have a notion of a good life ranging from saying that a good life is attained by practical codes of conduct to requests to engage in a certain positive …show more content…
The objective quality of life reveals itself in a person’s ability to adapt to the values of a culture and tells us little about that person’s life. Examples may be social status or the status symbols one should have to be a good member of that culture. (Objective is used here in the sense of nonsubjective or objective facts. Nonsubjective is concerned with the external and easily established conditions of life that many observers can rate identically.) The notion of a good life can be observed from subjective to the objective, where this spectrum incorporates a number of existing quality of life theories. We call this spectrum the integrative quality-of-life (IQOL) theory and discuss the following aspects in this paper: well-being, satisfaction with life, happiness, meaning in life, the biological information system (“balance”), realizing life potential, fulfillment of needs, and objective factors. Well Being: The most natural aspect of the subjective quality of life is well being. The quality of life is seen here in terms of an assessment of one’s own quality of life. When we meet other people, we always say, "How are you? or "How’s life?" We are thus asking that person to give us an evaluation of their quality of life. Satisfaction with Life: When people are asked whether they are satisfied with life, they often say that something or other is amiss. People are usually less satisfied with life than their state of well-being would
Lyubomirsky defines happiness as the “experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile” (184). She challenges the myths that people can find happiness by changing their circumstances and that people either are “born happy or unhappy” (186). Happiness is not something that can be found or something that not everyone can have. People make their own happiness, despite the difficulties they may face. Happiness comes by “choosing to change and manage your state of mind” (185). Lyubomirsky gives cases of people who are happy even though they suffer from losses and setbacks. These are the people whose circumstances should make them unhappy, but their intentional actions bring them joy. She also gives cases of people who have not suffered any major losses but are still unhappy because they may see events negatively and feel helpless before them. Lyubomirsky asserts that “changes in our circumstances, no matter how positive and stunning, actually have little bearing on our well-being” (186). Even though a person’s circumstances may be positive, those circumstances do not make them happy. Lyubomirsky uses a Subjective Happiness Scale to measure happiness, which takes the average of numerical answers to four questions. She argues that in order to become happier, “you need to determine your present personal happiness level, which will provide your first estimate of your happiness
What does quality of life mean? How would a person define the concept of quality of life? Philosophers have studied questions similar to these in the aspect of what constitutes a “good” life for hundreds of years. There really is no certain date to the origin of quality of life as a specific term. In the years 1953 to 1954, two economists have been linked as the ones who used the concept in expressing their concern over ecological dangers of unlimited economic growth (Snoek, 2000). Other economists in the 1950s researched the ideas of what
Happiness is an essential goal for most people. From books and expensive classes that teach people how to achieve happiness to the fundamental right of “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, the importance of happiness is evident in society. This causes the rise to two fundamental questions: “How does one attain happiness?” and “,How does happiness create a meaningful life?” Both happiness and living a meaningful life are achieved simultaneously. The search for happiness and the factors that make it brings meaning to life. Happiness can stem from several factors such as wisdom and knowledge, savoring life and its experiences, and even suffering and pain. Analyzing these factors brings meaning to one’s life.
Well-being as the prevalence of positive attributes. The state of being happy, healthy, or successful
Quality of life is how satisfied we are with our lives and whether there are parts of our health that affect this or inhibit this. For example if there was a lack of money in a family due to little financial support then their quality of life would not be good. This is because they would not be able to afford the necessities of life and other recreational activities.
Quality of Life: For the purpose of this paper, the level of living standards which include fundamental factors like health, financial stability, living conditions, and education.
Quality of daily life is a major factor that in presented in this article. Burd-Sharps and Lewis agree when they write:
According to the classic sense, a life full of happiness is a life that manifests wisdom, kindness, and goodness. However happiness has been twisted by a secular culture and the classic sense has given away to “pleasurable satisfaction”. Pleasurable satisfaction depends on external circumstances going well. Moreland points out that because of this the modern sense of happiness, “pleasurable satisfaction”, is unstable and varies with life’s circumstances. Pleasurable satisfaction becomes increasingly addictive and enslaving if it becomes the dominant aim of one’s life. By contrast, classical happiness brings freedom and power to life as one ought, as one increasingly becomes a unified person who lives for a cause bigger than one’s self. Western culture has been disillusioned into seeking happiness as their main priority in life. Although, happiness is important, when its importance becomes exaggerated, it leads to a loss of purpose in life, and even depression. What Western cultures need to realize is that true happiness can never be achieved. Over the past 50 years, levels of health, wealth, and liberties have increased, but levels of happiness haven’t.
Even if we use the word “happiness” on daily basis, has anyone ever tried to define it? It’s harder than it seems. When do you feel happy? How is it when you feel happy? Is there any way to understand how much happiness to you experience? This is the main hypothesis of this paper – Can happiness or wellbeing be measured? And if it can be measured, how do we measure it? Happiness is feeling pleasure and enjoyment because of your life, situation (Meriam Webster). Pleasure and enjoyment are very subjective and means different things to different people. This is where the term subjective wellbeing comes from. There are a lot of things that can be included when measuring wellbeing. Various studies have been conducted to assess wellbeing and how does it affect other factors. For example Earlstin(1995) and later on Ferrer-i-Carbonell(2005) have examined the relationship between income and happiness. Gruber(2004) studies the relationship cigarette taxation and happier smokers. Richard, Clark, Gerogellis and Diener(2004) analyze the effect of unemployment on wellbeing.
In searching for understanding in nursing, the dissection of a poorly defined concept often results in subsequent reflection and action toward comprehension (Bousso, Poles, & De Almeida Lopes Monteiro Da Cruz, 2014). Greater nursing knowledge is gained through the clarification of ambiguous concepts by exhaustive examination of particularly clinically relevant phenomenon. This knowledge can then be later extrapolated to develop new theories or simply be reformulated to refine concepts (Bousso et al., 2014). In analyzing quality of life (QOL), this writing attempts to reveal a more solidified and practical definition by evaluating the concepts common themes across various literature sources. The concepts universal attributes,
Certain medical treatments can vigorously impair quality of life without providing noticeable benefit, whereas other medical treatments greatly strengthen the quality of life. Quality of life is a broad multidimensional concept that usually includes subjective evaluations of both positive and negative aspects of life (Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQOL). Quality of life has a connotation to everyone, for each individual defines it in their own way. Quality of life includes physical and mental health perceptions such as energy level, mood, awareness and how they correlate to health risks and conditions, functional status, social support, and socioeconomic status. Key territories of overall quality of life are components of culture, values and spirituality that add to the complication of figuring out the quality of life for each patient. Quality of life is an important consideration in medical care and with its growing advances. Quality of life issues have historically played an important part in the nursing role of patient advocacy. In Year 2000 Oncology Nursing Society Research Priorities Survey by Mary E. Ropka, the results showed that the quality of life ranked second among the top twenty research priorities of the oncology nurses. Ultimately, the path to find a common ground on this controversy must be found soon, considering all patients lives matter and even the small things in the last few days can impact
Three arguments that are against objective values were found on The Ethical Life (P. 205) textbook that identify two problems with the cultural relativist’s argument are:
Satisfaction with life is oftentimes highly correlated with happiness, but it is not by inherently the same as happiness. One may be satisfied with one’s life outcomes or satisfied with external factors, without being very happy. Once discovering a satisfaction with life rating, one may be able to determine if satisfaction with life is something one can control, and if it is, one may be able to maximize one’s life satisfaction. For instance, if one is typically not searching for a mate, and he or she scores low on this scale, one may be more willing in the future to seek a partner if he or she knows that statistically speaking, people with partners are more satisfied with his or her life.
The World Health Organization defines quality of life as a person’s perceptions of their position in life in the setting of the culture and value systems in which they live in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns (Krageloh et al., 2011). The WHOQOL-100 was developed by the World Health Organization composed of many different doctors and other healthcare providers in order to develop an assessment that could be used internationally and cross-culturally to measure a person’s overall quality of life and well-being, instead of a specific disease. This assessment led to the development of the WHOQOL-BREF, which is an abbreviated version of the WHOQOL-100 because the WHOQOL-100 is too lengthy for practical use; WHOQOL-BREF includes instructions for administering and scoring the assessment. The purpose of this assessment is to provide quality assessments in healthcare, focus attention on all aspects of health, and produce interventions that increase focus on a patient’s well-being (Harper, 1996). There were three main stages to the development of the WHOQOL assessment. The first stage of development consisted of the establishment of a definition of quality of life and how the assessment would be used internationally. The second stage of development explored the quality of life cross-culturally among different fields to establish relevance to the quality of life assessment. The third stage of
It is common sense that all the human beings would like to live a happy life and they will spare no efforts in order to realize the purpose of really living a happy life in the end. However, different people have different definitions toward what a happy life is and they tend to have different standards as for how a life is that can be regarded as a happy life. There is no doubt that people will then try different means in order to pursue a happy life based on their definition toward what a happy life is. Therefore, the following will talk about the pursuit of a happy life from the perspectives of both Dalai Lama in The Art of Happiness and Viktor E. Frankl in Man’s Searching for Meaning, during which the experiences of some characters from the film Forrest Gump will be applied as evidence. Generally speaking, the pursuit of a happy life in the minds of Dalai Lama and Viktor E. Frankl can be achieved via experiencing sufferings and adversity. It is hoped that this analysis can help people understand what a happy is from a different point of view.