Research on constructing composite index of objective well-being from China mainland

Abstract

This paper presents some results of the study employing the Quality of Life (QOL) index that was initiated in China during 1980s. Currently, some progress has been made in the research field. For one thing, many researchers defined QOL as a composite structure which included subjective and objective elements. Considerable summary of well-being indices has been constructed from different analysis units (e.g., cities, province, and nations). For another, statistical methods played an important part in determining the weights of these indices, either objective weighting or subjective weighting. This paper defines the concept of QOL as the quality of people's being, which is used in analyzing the well-being of people' living condition and also reflected their subjective well-being to the living condition. Based on this concept, an analytical system of Chinese people's well-being was elaborated. 115 indices from five aspects reflecting the characteristics of the Chinese people's objective well-being have been initially proposed. Economic well-being, health and basic survival well-being, social well-being, cultural well-being, political well-being and environmental well-being have been taken into consideration. Through the analysis of content validity of experts and correlation analysis, 58 indices were selected. The weights of the subjective and objective indices were determined through analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and principal component method respectively. By combining the weight coefficients obtained from the two approaches, the composite indicator of Chinese people’s objective well-being was performed and the objective well-being level of 30 Chinese provinces was evaluated.