Social indicators are defined as statistical measures that describe social trends and conditions impacting on human well-being. Generally, social indicators perform one or more of three functions:
- providing information for decision-making
- monitoring and evaluating policies
- and/or searching for a common good and deciding how to reach it
Examples of social indicators cover the full range of issues that matter for individual, community and societal well-being. Common examples include:
- Poverty rate
- Inequality rate
- Educational attainment
- Life expectancy
- Employment and unemployment rates
- Obesity rate
- Fertility rate
- Health expenditure
- Suicide rates
- Youth neither in employment, education nor training (NEET rate)
- Life satisfaction (objective and subjective)
Objective social indicators are statistics which represent social facts independent of personal evaluations and subjective social indicators measure of individual perceptions, self-reports and evaluations of social conditions. There is an emerging consensus amongst experts that social progress and human well-being should be measured by a combination of both objective and subjective indicators.
During the 1990s, the concept of human development was promoted as a complement to existing
income-based approaches to international development. Rooted in the capabilities literature of
Amartya Sen and adopted by the Human Development Reports of the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), the primary aim of the human development paradigm was to
focus development thinking more upon the enhancement of people's freedoms, capabilities, and
wellbeing. Specifically, the human development approach sought to achieve three goals: i) to
make people the ends and not the means of development; ii) to refocus attention on what people
can be or do rather than what they can produce; and iii) to ensure that development policies are
aimed at improving people's quality of life, including their health, security, and overall
flourishing
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