Health and the quality of life

The aim of this investigation was to explain the impact of people's self-reported health on their levels of satisfaction with their health, and the impact of these things plus satisfaction with other specific domains of their lives on the perceived quality of their lives. The latter was operationalized as general happiness, satisfaction with life as a whole and overall satisfaction with the quality of life. Seven hundred and twenty-three (723) usable questionnaires returned from a mailout random sample of 2500 households of Prince George, British Columbia in November 1998 formed the working data-set for our analyses. Among other things, mean respondent scores on the SF-36 health profile were found to be lower than published norms from the UK, USA, Netherlands and Sweden, but higher than scores from Aberdeen, Scotland. Mean scores on the CES-D depression scale also indicated that our respondents tended to have more depressive symptoms than comparison groups in Winnipeg and the USA. A review of trends in mean scores on 17 quality of life items (e.g., satisfaction with family life, financial security, recreation, etc.) from 1994, 1997 and 1998 revealed that there were only 7 statistically significant changes across the four year period and they were all negative. Multivariate regression analysis showed that health status measured with a variety of indicators could explain 56% of the variation in respondents' reported satisfaction with their health. A combination of health status plus domain satisfaction indicators could explain 53% of the variation in respondents' reported happiness, 68% of reported life satisfaction and 63% of reported satisfaction with the overall quality of life. Sixty percent of the explained variation in happiness scores was attributable to self-reported health scores, while only 18% of the explained variation in satisfaction with life and with the overall quality of life scores was attributable self-reported health scores.