When a person takes the Quality of Life (QOL) Inventory, he or she rates each of the 16 areas of life according to how important it is (from 0 to 2) and how satisfied he or she is with it (from -3 to +3). Then the individual scores are combined according to a scoring algorithm to yield an overall QOL score that can be compared to national norms, showing how this persons satisfaction compares to the general population.
What interests me is the way the weighting works, where the importance level is multiplied by the satisfaction level for each item.
If the importance level is 0 (Not Important), the area of life is essentially removed from consideration. It can’t raise or lower the overall QOL score, even if it is an extreme value (-3 or +3). That seems reasonable. For people with no desire to have children or have contact with children, it wouldn’t make sense to lower their satisfaction levels because they had no children. It’s a ways of saying this area of life is irrelevant for me.
What I find particularly interesting is the way marking areas of life Important (1) rather than Extremely Important (2) puts a ceiling on overall QOL scores. Consider a person who thinks all items are important. That person’s maximum possible range of total weighted values is -48 to +48 (16 times +/-3 times 1). Another person who rates all areas of life Extremely Important (2), has a maximum possible range of -96 to +96 (16 times +/-3 times 2).
This implies two different approaches to raising life satisfaction scores:
- For an area with a negative satisfaction score, one can work to raise the satisfaction score or reduce the importance score or both.
- For an area with a positive satisfaction score, one can still work to raise the satisfaction score. But instead of reducing the importance score, one could work to raise it.
Does it make sense to think about modifying both sides of the QOLI like this, or should one view the importance levels as fixed representations of the way a given person weighs the 16 areas of life?
If it makes sense to modify the satisfaction level as well, what are the positive interventions targeted at doing so?
I know this may be like “teaching to the test” but I think the question is an interesting one: Is a person with more Extremely Important areas of life endowed with greater potential life satisfaction than a person with fewer Extremely Important areas?
