Categories of individual welfare
Objective Living Conditions
Subjective Well-being
GoodBad
GoodWELL-BEINGDISSONANCE
BadADAPTIONDEPRIVATION

 

'Adaptation' refers to what many researchers see as the problematic combination of bad living conditions and high levels of satisfaction, sometimes known as the 'satisfaction paradox' or 'disability paradox' . The existence of persons in this quadrant is simultaneously the driving force behind the contention that objective and subjective evaluations of QOL must be separately measured, the reason why 'Scandinavian' researchers ignore subjectivity altogether and instead measure only 'objective' circumstances, and the cause of considerable anger among disability researchers who note that only the able-bodied would necessarily expect people with disabilities to have an inferior quality of life.
Source: Mark Rapley, Quality of Life Research (Sage, 2003), 34.