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The Social Indicators Movement: Progress, Paradigms, Puzzles, Promise and Potential Research Directions
This paper is a response to the article entitled “Fifty years after the Social Indicators Movement: Has the promise been fulfilled?” by Ken Land and Alex Michalos (2015) which constitutes a careful review of the historical development of the Social Indicators Movement, utility of social indicators i...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Springer Netherlands
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089222/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32214607 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1552-1 |
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author | Shek, Daniel T. L. Wu, Florence K. Y. |
author_facet | Shek, Daniel T. L. Wu, Florence K. Y. |
author_sort | Shek, Daniel T. L. |
collection | PubMed |
description | This paper is a response to the article entitled “Fifty years after the Social Indicators Movement: Has the promise been fulfilled?” by Ken Land and Alex Michalos (2015) which constitutes a careful review of the historical development of the Social Indicators Movement, utility of social indicators in shaping the concept of quality of life and subjective well-being, and issues deserving social indicators research in future. In this response paper, we join in the discussion by highlighting five issues—progress, paradigms, puzzles, promise, and potential research directions of social indicators research. In terms of progress, while we have accomplished many tasks proposed by Solomon et al. (The quality of life, Sage, London 1980), some of them are yet to be achieved. Regarding research paradigms surrounding social indicators, researchers have primarily used positivistic or post-positivistic orientation to conduct and interpret social indicators research, with relatively fewer studies using interpretive, constructionist or critical theory perspective. There are also several puzzles deserving consideration. These include (a) the use of “other types of evidence”, particularly qualitative data; (b) evaluation of social programs; (c) feasibility of assessing “social progress”; (d) choice of social indicators; (e) interpretation of findings; (f) methodological debates; and (g) explanations for social change. Finally, the promise of social indicators research to promote quality of life and potential future research directions of social indicators research are discussed. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7089222 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Springer Netherlands |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-70892222020-03-23 The Social Indicators Movement: Progress, Paradigms, Puzzles, Promise and Potential Research Directions Shek, Daniel T. L. Wu, Florence K. Y. Soc Indic Res Article This paper is a response to the article entitled “Fifty years after the Social Indicators Movement: Has the promise been fulfilled?” by Ken Land and Alex Michalos (2015) which constitutes a careful review of the historical development of the Social Indicators Movement, utility of social indicators in shaping the concept of quality of life and subjective well-being, and issues deserving social indicators research in future. In this response paper, we join in the discussion by highlighting five issues—progress, paradigms, puzzles, promise, and potential research directions of social indicators research. In terms of progress, while we have accomplished many tasks proposed by Solomon et al. (The quality of life, Sage, London 1980), some of them are yet to be achieved. Regarding research paradigms surrounding social indicators, researchers have primarily used positivistic or post-positivistic orientation to conduct and interpret social indicators research, with relatively fewer studies using interpretive, constructionist or critical theory perspective. There are also several puzzles deserving consideration. These include (a) the use of “other types of evidence”, particularly qualitative data; (b) evaluation of social programs; (c) feasibility of assessing “social progress”; (d) choice of social indicators; (e) interpretation of findings; (f) methodological debates; and (g) explanations for social change. Finally, the promise of social indicators research to promote quality of life and potential future research directions of social indicators research are discussed. Springer Netherlands 2017-01-11 2018 /pmc/articles/PMC7089222/ /pubmed/32214607 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1552-1 Text en © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. |
spellingShingle | Article Shek, Daniel T. L. Wu, Florence K. Y. The Social Indicators Movement: Progress, Paradigms, Puzzles, Promise and Potential Research Directions |
title | The Social Indicators Movement: Progress, Paradigms, Puzzles, Promise and Potential Research Directions |
title_full | The Social Indicators Movement: Progress, Paradigms, Puzzles, Promise and Potential Research Directions |
title_fullStr | The Social Indicators Movement: Progress, Paradigms, Puzzles, Promise and Potential Research Directions |
title_full_unstemmed | The Social Indicators Movement: Progress, Paradigms, Puzzles, Promise and Potential Research Directions |
title_short | The Social Indicators Movement: Progress, Paradigms, Puzzles, Promise and Potential Research Directions |
title_sort | social indicators movement: progress, paradigms, puzzles, promise and potential research directions |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089222/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32214607 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1552-1 |
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