Quality of life indices: how robust are the results considering different aggregation techniques?

Abstract

The quality of life has been an attractive topic for several decades, and it has received attention in the scientific, political and public spheres. However, in a growing number of studies aimed at assessing the quality of life, inconsistencies persist in the definition, theoretical underpinnings and in approaches to assessing the quality of life. This study aims to compare the results of different methods of aggregating quality of life indicators into a synthetic index. The synthesis of individual sub-indices results in a final quality of life index and a typology which describes the variability arising from using different index calculation methods. The individual approaches to the calculations confirm the partial robustness of the results which, at the same time, can be an inspiration for a range of tasks where the parallel use of different methods reveals interesting internal relationships in the analysed data.