Results from the Quality of Life Survey show that quality of life is unevenly distributed in the population (Støren and Rønning, 2021; Støren, Rønning and Gram, 2020). The subjective quality of life is highest among people in work, people with long education or high income, and lowest among people with short education or low income, who are students or not in work due to disability or unemployment, have long-term health problems or psychological problems, or are non-heterosexual.

It is the relationship between these characteristics in relation to quality of life that we look at in more detail in this report, because people can have several of these characteristics. People with a low quality of life may, for example, both have health problems and not be in work. We assume that having several such characteristics can mean something for quality of life, and that there is variation in quality of life between different combinations of characteristics. This has been little investigated in previous analyses.

The project looks at three different dimensions of variation in quality of life:

  • prevalence of having one or more characteristics associated with a lower quality of life.
  • connection between different combinations of characteristics and satisfaction with life.
  • which characteristics have the strongest connection with satisfaction with life.

The descriptive analyses in Chapter 2 show that most of the population have one or more of the characteristics associated with a lower quality of life, and that a majority have two or more. On a scale from 1-10, the average quality of life in the population is 6.8. Among those who do not have any of the characteristics, the average satisfaction is 8.0. The more characteristics one has, the lower the satisfaction with life. For example, people with 2 characteristics have an average satisfaction of life of 7.0, while for people with 5 characteristics it is 5.3. At the same time, we see that the effect on quality of life is conditioned by which characteristics people have. For example, people under 45 with a low income have a higher quality of life (average 7.9) than the national average, while people who have little financial flexibility and long-term health problems have a somewhat lower quality of life (average 6.4) than the national average. In addition, the analyses also show that certain characteristics alone are not associated with lower satisfaction.

In order to test the reliability of the effect of the various characteristics that are associated with low quality of life, we have run a set of regression analyses. These analyses show that both economic, social and psychological factors are related to quality of life when the effects of each individual characteristic are controlled for. In this section, we have also run covariance analyses, and they show that when we study characteristics associated with low quality of life, in several cases the correlation between a characteristic of low quality of life is conditioned by other characteristics: the correlation between age and quality of life (which is positive on average) is conditioned by the degree of financial difficulty, where people with greater financial difficulty have a relatively low quality of life by age compared to people with lesser financial difficulty, and that the connection between income and quality of life (which is basically positive) is conditioned by whether one has a social network with people to trust. The analyses illustrate some of the complexity in how people's quality of life is affected and can be linked to many different factors.