The Relationship Between Objective Life Status and Subjective Life Satisfaction With Quality of Life

Abstract

A locally developed quality of life inventory was used to examine the relationship between objective life status and subjective satisfaction with quality of life in 8,550 participants from Hunan, China. The inventory included 112 items in 4 dimensions—physical health, psychological health, social functional status, and living conditions. Objective life status was the principal factor affecting subjective satisfaction, but discrepancies were found in some participants, especially when objective status was at the extremes of the distribution. Young, urban, or more educated participants with higher scores on objective status often had lower subjective satisfaction scores in spite of comparatively high objective status scores. Participants who ranked lower on objective status (old, rural, or less educated people) sometimes ranked higher in subjective satisfaction. Scores for subjective satisfaction always showed a normal distribution, whatever the objective satisfaction of the population. Divergence between individual objective status and subjective satisfaction was associated with hierarchy of life needs and the reference standards used for the comparison.