Social problems and the quality of Life by Robert H. Lauer and Jeanette C. Lauer

The Eleventh edition

Social problems and the quality of Life by Robert H. Lauer and Jeanette C. Lauer

Thesis Statement

Social problems most acutely impact the quality of our lives.

Introduction

Generally speaking, by "social indicator," the advocates of the social indicators movement meant any piece of statistical data that can stand as a proxy for welfare. A social indicator can be used for the evaluation of how well the lives of people go in a society. A suitably general social indicator might be correlated with the welfare of all the members of society, or perhaps even with the welfare of people living in different societies; more narrow indicators may be correlated with the welfare of particular groups within society. Thus, combined with economic indicators, social indicators can give a more comprehensive picture of individual and social welfare.

The idea of making all the different cultures into one culture; "a pot of stew", has not been very popular among the Hispanic Americans. They are part of American life, even though they tend to stick to their original language more than many other groups. With complete assimilation or when completely assimilated in a new country, you forget your culture and identity, and become a part of a new culture, which is here the American culture. They want to preserve their own identity, defined by their Hispanic social and cultural background, rather than see their culture melted with other cultural influences. (Aubry 2006)

Social indicators research started to blossom in the 1970s. But there was little agreement on its methodology and objectives. Soon, it became a wide and diverse field, with substantial differences in conceptual approach, methodology, and objective. There were no common criteria for problem definition, subject choice, and data collection. Thus, the social indicators movement subsequently fragmented into areas that generally have little in common. This was partly caused by the haphazard development of social indicators research, since the impetus for its progress more often than not came from the information needs associated with specific social decision-making problems rather than from a systematic clarification of its conceptual and methodological background.

Discussion

One of the new areas emerging from this field was quality of life research. It appears that two factors have played a key role in the separation of this area. The first concerns the subject matter of social indicators research, the second its methodology. On the one hand, as the focus of the social indicators movement broadened, the question of what precisely social indicators were meant to measure became more pressing. Many projects were undertaken that, arguably, had little to do with measuring welfare. Some argued that research should not be limited to indicators that are relevant to welfare, since this would unduly restrict the range of variables that can be taken into account. Accordingly, social indicators have many applications today. Others, however, remained committed to the objective of measuring welfare. Their area has come to be called quality of life ...