Away from dissatisfaction, closer to well-being: a multidimensional synthetic measure

As part of the debate about methods for measuring social progress of population, there has been increasing interest in individual subjective opinions about quality of life. In the literature, many methods have been introduced for constructing synthetic measures of subjective well-being. Casacci and Pareto (Casacci and Pareto, 2015) recently proposed an interesting method, in which they applied a normalized quadratic index of dissimilarity for ordinal data (Leti, 1983), to data from Istat’s Multipurpose survey on households - aspects of daily life regarding people’s opinions about the level of satisfaction for some aspects of daily life. This method seems preferable compared to other ones already known in the literature, since it does not need to quantify the values of ordinal variables, as other methods do (Băltătescu, 2002); moreover, it makes it possible to take into account the different levels of satisfaction that have been declared by the satisfied people, without aggregating them in one category (as other methods do). However, the index can be applied to one aspect (variable) at a time, thus focusing on a one-dimensional perspective of well-being, while subjective well-being concerns simultaneously all the different aspects that affect the quality of life and interact with one other. As a consequence, an index devoted to measuring subjective well-being in terms of an overall degree of satisfaction should take into account all the most important aspects of quality of life simultaneously. Starting from Istat’s Multipurpose survey on households - aspects of daily life, regarding people’s opinions about the level of satisfaction for some aspects of daily life, first of all the analysis aims at measuring the subjective well-being of the Italian population. To pursue this aim, we then propose a method for constructing a global satisfaction index, which allows us to consider several aspects simultaneously. The analysis is based on the Istat survey microdata. For each year, the multivariate distribution of the Italian population according to the seven variables is compared to the analogous distribution referring to a hypothetical population where all people were not at all satisfied for all variables