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Frank M. Andrews, Stephen B. Withey
"Identifying life concerns, and learning about their organization, generates basic knowledge that is necessary for the rational development of social indicators of perceived life quality. The basic assumption is that people's sense of well-being has a lot to do with their feelings about specific aspects of life that concern them... 'Concerns' are what life - in the view of the people living it - is 'all about.' "
JLJ - Indicators of well-being seem like a great place to start when investigating heuristics of artificial intelligence for the playing of complex games of strategy. The set of indicators should be (p.4) limited, comprehensive, coherent, significant, and of direct normative interest - or things we care about.
The process of developing and applying social indicators to monitor and attempt to perform social change - can we carefully apply it to the theory of complex games of strategy? If so, we would start with indicators or perceptions of well-being. The authors even show you how they constructed their set of indicators of well-being.
The Andrews-Withey work in question reflects the thinking of the age - the 'Great Society' thinking of the 1960s and early 1970s that we can press buttons and apply federal funding and wipe out poverty and crime and disease and create useful work for the support of happy growing families. I am not suggesting that this cannot be done, or that it has not already been done to some degree. Perhaps in 2018 we can begin to learn the limits to social engineering - exactly how far can we go to 'make' people happy - how far does this actually 'work,' and how much of it must therefore be done by the people themselves.
Andrews and Withey sidestep the creative problem of manufacturing the indicators by creating instead a survey which - when distributed, filled out, collected and assembled - 'produces' the answers of interest. The world of social science is also awash with indicators of all kinds - one simply has to select which ones to group into a larger indicator of, say well-being.
Andrews and Withey unfortunately put the reader to sleep with tables of indicators and inter-connected circle-maps that only a true social scientist can love. There is a reason books like this one sit on the library shelves, unread, and are eventually unloaded on e-bay or amazon for whatever can be had...
v This is a study about perceptions of well-being.
p.2 We can do nothing about the earth's spin, and maybe we should do nothing about the weather except cope with it, but most social phenomena are of our own making and subject to our own direction.
p.2 [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1971, p. 104]
Social indicators... if they are to be fully useful, must be formulated in such a way that public and private administrations can draw coherent and valid policy conclusions from them.
p.3 Considerable debate has arisen as to what really constitutes a social indicator. The U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, in their publication Toward a Social Report, defines the term as follows:
A social indicator... may be defined to be a statistic of direct normative interest which facilitates concise, comprehensive and balanced judgments about the condition of major aspects of a society. (U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1969, p.97)
The key concepts here are "normative interest" and the implication of relevance to policy making. Normative interest implies that an indicator measures something we care about directly and over which we want to maintain some control or guidance.
p.3 Elaine Carlisle says, "A social indicator is defined as the operational definition or part of the operational definition of any one of the concepts central to the generation of an information system descriptive of the social system" (Carlisle, 1972, p. 25).
p.4 A paper by Sawhill (1969) describes social indicators as "quantitative measures of social conditions designed to guide choices at several levels of decision making."
Several facets of these definitions reflect the basic perspectives of the social indicator effort. The quest is for a limited yet comprehensive set of coherent and significant indicators, which can be monitored over time, and which can be disaggregated to the level of the relevant social unit.
p.4 The quest is for a limited yet comprehensive set of coherent and significant indicators, which can be monitored over time, and which can be disaggregated to the level of the relevant social unit... The set of indicators [JLJ - text formatting added for emphasis]
- should be "limited" so they can be understandable and not overly detailed, lengthy, or complex.
- The indicators should be "comprehensive" so that a substantial portion of the most salient or critical aspects of society is included.
- They should be "coherent" in that it would be helpful to our understanding if they hung together in some form that would eventually lead to a model or theory about how society operates.
- Any set of indicators would be "significant" if they fulfilled the foregoing demands but
- there is a further implication that they should be of "direct normative interest," which implies that they should relate to aspects of society that interest or concern us.
p.5 Bateson (1972)... proposes that what people care most about is not episodes or things as such but the pattern and setting of their personal relationships - how they stand in love, belonging, hate, respect, responsibility, dependency, trust, and other similar abstract but nonetheless real relations. He proposes that it is with respect to these relationships that we feel psychological pain, and that it is these pains that can reset the controls on our evaluations and behaviors.
[JLJ - Geoffrey Vickers also echoes this theme in his works.]
p.5 Many indicators of social conditions that are currently available would be classified as objective... However, since it is widely agreed that the notion of quality of life includes important perceptual and subjective elements, there is need for indicators that reflect these elements as well as for indicators that tap the more objective components.
p.6 Once one grants the desirability of measuring, and monitoring over time, a wider range of social characteristics than are currently being observed, there arises an immediate question: What to measure? ...The investigations reported here concentrate on perceptions of well-being.
p.7 Even when we focus on perceptions of well-being, however, there are a variety of possible research approaches. One possibility is to explore the components of perceived well-being. Alternatives are to identify and measure the factors that influence perceptions of well-being, or to investigate the social and psychological effects produced by differences in perceived well-being... First, however, we need to learn about well-being itself: What its components are, how they relate to one another, combine, change over time, and vary across social, cultural, geographic groupings. After gaining knowledge about these matters, one would be ready to begin exploring the causes, and the effects, of differences in well-being.
p.11 Based on our pilot work, we confirmed the idea that people could and did divide their lives up into domains that, although not isolated, were separate enough to be identified and evaluated as a distinguishable part of life... We also developed a list of another set of concerns. These were the criteria, or values, by which one judged or evaluated how one felt about the various domains of our life.
p.12 The quality of life is not just a matter of the conditions of one's physical, interpersonal and social setting but also a matter of how these are judged and evaluated by oneself and others. The values that one brings to bear on life are in themselves determinants of one's assessed quality of life... It may well be that subjective quality of life is better understood by studying the nature and determinants of value structures than by assessing the more objective conditions of living.
p.23-24 An adequate monitoring of perceptual indicators of well-being requires that they be measured with breadth, with relevance to major subgroups in the population, with statistical and economic efficiency, with validity, and with flexibility. The technology of survey research now permits the achievement of some of these goals.
p.27 Identifying life concerns, and learning about their organization, generates basic knowledge that is necessary for the rational development of social indicators of perceived life quality. The basic assumption is that people's sense of well-being has a lot to do with their feelings about specific aspects of life that concern them... "Concerns" are what life - in the view of the people living it - is "all about."
p.30 The task of identifying concerns... One source was previous surveys... that had included open questions about people's concerns...
All of us want certain things out of life. When you think about what really matters in your own life, what are your wishes and hopes for the future? In other words, if you imagine your future in the best possible light, what would your life look like then, if you are to be happy? (Cantril, 1965)
In this study we are interested in people's views about many different things. What things going on in the United States these days worry or concern you? (Blumenthal et al., 1972)
p.30-31 A second type of source was structured interviews... A third type of source...was previously published lists of values... Finally, we checked to make sure that our list of concerns included those receiving attention from official national and international bodies doing work on social indicators, and from certain other researchers known to be working in the field.
p.35 Given the list of 123 concern items, the next step was to explore how they fit together in people's thinking.
p.59 Identifying aspects of life that concern people, and learning how people's feelings about these concerns are organized, generate basic knowledge needed for rational development of perceptual indicators.
p.129 If one uses a dozen predictors, there is sufficient overlap among them that the removal of any one does not produce a marked decrement in explanatory power.
p.149 The precise set of concern measures used to make the prediction is shown not to be critical (though some sets are better than others). Predictions at close to maximum possible levels were achieved using modest numbers of domain-type items, or of criterion-type items (or both). Even less-than-optimal sets of concern measures achieved reasonably good predictive levels if the measures tapped a heterogeneous combination of regions of the perceptual structure.
p.233 These analyses suggest that concern-level evaluations are substantially related to people's perceptions of how well their needs are being met, but that the Needs satisfaction perspective by itself is not sufficient to fully explain the evaluations. Other frames of reference are apparently being considered.
p.339 One of the major goals of our work has been to develop methods for measuring perceived well-being... The uses and applications we foresee are the monitoring of perceived well-being over time, the comparison of findings on perceived well-being in one specific national population with results from other societies and cultures, and the inclusion of well-being measures in studies investigating other variables and interests.
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