Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.
Carried out every four years, the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) examines both the objective circumstances of European citizens' lives and how they feel about those circumstances and their lives in general. It collects data on a range of issues, such as employment, income, education, housing, family, health and work-life balance. It also looks at subjective topics, such as people's levels of happiness, life satisfaction, and perceived quality of society. By running the survey regularly, it has also become possible to track key trends in the quality of people's lives over time. Previous surveys have shown, for instance, that people are having greater difficulty making ends meet since the economic crisis began. In many countries, they also feel that there is now more tension between people from different ethnic groups. And across Europe, people now trust their governments less than they did before. However, people still continue to get the greatest satisfaction from their family life and personal relationships. Over the years, the EQLS has developed into a valuable set of indicators which complements traditional indicators of economic growth and living standard such as GDP or income. The EQLS indicators are more inclusive of environmental and social aspects of progress and therefore are easily integrated into the decision-making process and taken up by public debate at EU and national levels in the European Union. In each wave a sample of adult population has been selected randomly for a face to face interview. In view of the prospective European enlargements the geographical coverage of the survey has expanded over time from 28 countries in 2003 to 34 countries in 2011-12. Further information about the survey can be found on the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) EQLS web pages. For the second edition (January 2014) the data file has been updated with a new total weighting variable. See documentation for further details and see also the updated version of the EQLS integrated file, held under SN 7348).
Main Topics:
The survey covers multiple dimensions of quality of life: employment and work-life balance, income and deprivation, housing and local environment, family and social contacts, health and mental wellbeing, subjective wellbeing (e.g. happiness, life satisfaction), social exclusion, perceived quality of society (e.g. tensions, trust in institutions) as well as access to and perceived quality of public services.
Multi-stage stratified random sample
See documentation for details
Face-to-face interview
