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Sociocultural and economic aspects of quality of life measurement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2020

D Chisholm  and
D Bhugra
D Chisholm
Affiliation:
Centre for the Economics of Mental Health, Institute of Psychiatry, 7 Windsor Walk, LondonSE5 8BB
D Bhugra
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park. LondonSE5 8AF, UK
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Summary

Obtaining a level of consensus over the definition, construction and measurement of the concept of quality of life would allow for an improved degree of standardization in the assessment of clinical intervention for people with mental health problems. One of the many benefits of this standardization would be the ability to make valid and reliable comparisons between various interventions and across different groups or settings, which is of particular interest to economists. There are, however, a host of sociocultural issues that present fundamental obstacles to the satisfactory attainment of consensus over definitions and domains of quality of life. This paper considers the arguments pertinent to each of these two alternative perspectives, the economic and the sociocultural (or anthropological), and draws out the lessons that these perspectives — despite the apparent polarity that exists between them — can offer to the improved measurement of quality of life for those with mental health problems.

Keywords

anthropologycross-cultural psychiatryeconomic analysisquality of life
Type
Research Article
Information
European Psychiatry , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , 1997 , pp. 210 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © Elsevier, Paris 1997

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