The Development of Official Social Statistics in Italy with a Life Quality Approach

The article covers the main steps of official statistics in the second half of the Nineties through the illustration of the transition from economic oriented official statistics to the quality of life approach. The system of the Multipurpose Surveys introduced in 1993 to give an answer to questions at social level and to provide indicators for social policies, has been developed with a quality of life approach that combines the objective dimension to the subjective one. All dimensions of the social sphere have been analyzed with this approach: health, crime, leisure, work, poverty and deprivation. Sometimes the subjective questions were proxy of the objective situation, such as health and sometimes subjective aspects complemented the objective as in the case of crime and poverty. The history of the Italian official statistics is an example of how it is possible to realize a qualitative leap in social statistics integrating the objective and the subjective dimension.