Household satisfaction: Past, present and future perspectives

In the past two decades South African quality of life has been measured at the individual level in nationwide surveys and studies of special groups using happiness and satisfaction measures. In 1993 the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (Saldru) pioneered a satisfaction measure to capture subjective well‐being at the household level for the Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD). The article assesses the usefulness of the new indicator by comparing present household satisfaction with individual‐level satisfaction trends and with PSLSD measures of past and projected future satisfaction and household income and expenditure. It is concluded that the household satisfaction measure is a useful social indicator in that it yields consistent and readily interpretable results and is sensitive to income and expenditure differentials. In confirmation of findings from a recent cross‐national study, the higher income households in the Saldru study reported higher levels of perceived well‐being.

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Centre for Social and Development Studies, University of Natal, Durban.

Revised version of a paper first presented at a workshop on Statistics for Measuring Poverty, Saldru, University of Cape Town, December 8–9, 1994. Access to the Saldru database on statistics on living standards and development is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks go to colleagues in the Centre for Social and Development Studies: Richard Devey assisted with data‐processing and Nicolette Wells and Judy Ngcobo with the processing of the tables