Comments on Minter Dialogue Blog: Measuring Quality of Life - A review between Franc...

@GD. I can hardly help adding another comment and...

2009-11-08T08:15:32.808+01:00

@GD. I can hardly help adding another comment and that is the amount of time the French also SPEAK about food. At dinner tables, I often find that the French are able to spend oodles of time talking about how the food was exquisitely prepared, how it could have been prepared differently or how the food for tomorrow's meal might be coming along... etc. And THAT is a strictly cultural phenomenon.

@GD, you bring up several good points. The notion...

2009-11-07T11:44:21.663+01:00

@GD, you bring up several good points. The notion of family time at the table and the amount of homework... In the family meals, during the regular work week, ie for most, there is a choice, essentially between the rush of the morning breakfast versus the fatigue in the evening dinner. For me, the best solution lies in having earlier dinners, with the children.

Parental involvement in the homework only lasts up to a certain age, which means the family dinners and the conversations at table are the most valuable, critical times.

Too much homework at the expense of other extra-curricular activities is not healthy, either. The issue becomes how to find the right balance and there is no one size fits all approach, especially since not all schools have he same facilities, not all kids have he same dispositions, etc.

Here the question is one of personal culture. In all cases, as you say, it is a question of culture, including cultural references.

Dear Minter, It is also and mainly a matter of cul...

2009-11-06T17:41:14.396+01:00

Dear Minter,
It is also and mainly a matter of culture. French spend a long time at the dinner table not necessarily eating but discussing and enjoyong being together. Lunch and dinner are also a social behavior... I remember an American advertising on TV trying to help families to sort out relational problems: a guy sits on dinner table and says "If you have problems within the family I am sitting on the solution... Take at least one family meal together a WEEK!!!" In the U.S most of the people come home early after school or work, storm the fridge and leave for another activity. In France kids and parents are busy with huge home work and fixing dinner...

Try the National Sleep Foundation (SleepFoundation...

2009-11-04T12:42:10.102+01:00

Try the National Sleep Foundation (SleepFoundation) and check the annual 'Sleep in America' poll that consistently shows people report getting much less sleep than the amount in this OECD article. You should be able to find several years worth of data; also, the website has other information about the 'required' amount of sleep.

Other references are more likely to be professional publications; for example, Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine (Kryger, Roth, Dement are the editors) has several relevant chapters.

The best source of objective data I have seen for ...

2009-11-04T12:39:40.635+01:00

The best source of objective data I have seen for the US, although it has never been published separately, is data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data, a series of *yearly* probability samples of 39,000 to 100,000 people. In this sample, the percentage of adults who reported sleeping 6 hours or less jumped from approximately 20% of the population in 1985 to 25% of the population in 2004 across all age groups (presentation by E. Sonik, Ph.D., Director, National Center for Health Statistics, presentation at Institute of Medicine, Sleep Medicine and Research Meeting, Hotel Monaco, Washington, DC, June 29, 2005). I am sure it is possible to get the "updated" data on this survey for more recent years on the internet or just requesting the NHIS survey data.

It was really striking to see how much sleep time went down year after after year in this survey.

For France, I am really not sure at all. The possible source for this information may be Damien Leger (Paris), or Pierre Philip (Bordeaux).

The NSF data is also good, but not as well controlled as the NHIS which was designed to be representative of the US population.

In subsequent conversations and readings, I have f...

2009-11-03T21:23:21.568+01:00

In subsequent conversations and readings, I have found that the sleep data from the OECD report would seem to conflict with other reports of generalized sleep deprivation in many countries… The 8+ hours of sleep recorded in the OECD study seems controversial, if not unbelievable.

@ChristopheFaurie, you are right to point that out...

2009-10-23T13:05:52.874+02:00

@ChristopheFaurie, you are right to point that out. Quality of life is much more than just food, sleep and holidays... and the emotional component and "happiness" are elusive things to measure.

Doing a bit of research on wikipedia http://㐁훊.sl.pt (sourced from the World Health Organisation), the suicide rate for France is indeed higher at 17.6 per 100,000 per year. As such, on the wikipedia listing, France ranks 20th in the 'world rankings', knowing that the list does not include Pakistan, Afghanistan or North Korea (among others) and that Iran is cited as having a rate of 0.1 (1991 data!)...

Taking the 30 OECD countries, France ranks as having the 6th highest rate, with South Korea (26.1) and Japan (23.7) taking top 'honours'. The USA (11.1) ranks 20th while Norway (11.6) comes in at 16th.

Quality of life is emphatically cultural and depends on many things. Suicides may even be termed as 'cultural'. Nonetheless, suicides and the number of anti-depressants purchased, etc. are certainly revealing...

That said, under some conditions, a long life is not necessarily a blessing either.

There are also more sucides in France than in the ...

2009-10-22T20:08:52.297+02:00

There are also more sucides in France than in the USA...