Enhancing Quality of Life (QOL) has long been an explicit or implicit goal for individuals,
communities, nations, and the world. But defining QOL and measuring progress toward
meeting this goal have been elusive. Diverse “objective” and “subjective” indicators across a
range of disciplines and scales, and recent work on subjective well-being (SWB) surveys and
the psychology of happiness have spurred interest. Drawing from multiple disciplines, we
present an integrative definition of QOL that combines measures of human needs with
subjective well-being or happiness. QOL is proposed as a multi-scale, multi-dimensional
concept that contains interacting objective and subjective elements. We relate QOL to the
opportunities that are provided to meet human needs in the forms of built, human, social and
natural capital (in addition to time) and the policy options that are available to enhance these
opportunities. Issues related to defining, measuring, and scaling these concepts are