Recommendations for measuring perceptions in household surveys

Recent years have seen a growing international interest in incorporating information on how citizens perceive and evaluate well-being into the monitoring of social progress. The emerging consensus maintains that conventional measurements of well-being are insufficient to provide a complete overview of quality of life. In turn, the recent wave of protests in different parts of the world, together with the crises in labour markets and in health, education and care systems, further aggravated by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, has underscored the need to make progress with measuring people’s perceptions in order to explore the complexity of social phenomena and contribute to the design of public policies.

Despite the increased acceptance of the importance of subjective information about well-being, much work still remains to be done. Although the report by Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi (2009) urged national statistical offices to include more subjective information, few Latin American countries have as yet incorporated the necessary questions into their surveys.

This document therefore offers recommendations for using household surveys to generate subjective indicators in order to make progress in this area and contribute to strengthening the capacities of national statistical systems for measuring well-being through subjective information. The document is structured as follows: The first chapter discusses the background and objectives of the text. The second sets out guidelines for establishing a framework for perception-based indicators. Chapter III offers a compilation of international experiences with measuring perceptions that can serve as a point of reference for the region. The fourth chapter explores the gender perspective and intersectionality in measuring perceptions. Chapter V presents the conceptual and methodological framework, identifying the thematic areas of interest for regional public policies. The sixth chapter proposes indicators calculated on the basis of two questionnaires —one basic and the other expanded (see annex A1)— while a series of conclusions are offered in chapter VII.