The Robert W.

Kleemeier Memorial Lecture

Four sectors comprising "the good life" are described: behavioral competence, psychological
well-being, perceived quality of life, and objective environment. Each may be divided into
conceptually meaningful domains capable of being measured. Assessment approaches for each
sector are described and empirical evidence is presented regarding interrelationships among
them. Nonetheless, each sector implies individual and social goals that are defensible without
regard to how much the effect of change in one is reflected in change in another sector. All
sectors influence the self, which in turn re-energizes the sectors.

Environment and Other Determinants

of Weil-Being in Older People1

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M. Powell Lawton, PhD:

The opportunity to deliver the Kleemeier Lecture
gives me particular pleasure because it was Bob who
founded the thriving area that we know today as the
environmental psychology of later life. His landmark
chapter (Kleemeier, 1959) in the original Birren Hand-
book (1959) was called "Behavior and the Organiza-
tion of the Bodily and the External Environment." I
have probably read it a dozen times. In reading it
again for this lecture, I continue to be amazed at how
far ahead of other work it was. In this chapter
Kleemeier discussed the aging process as a modifier
of the relations between the person and the outside
world. He raised issues regarding the visual environ-
ment, the auditory environment, and the thermal
environmentthat could be published today. His crea-
tive thinking about prosthetic environments pre-
ceded by 5 years that term as coined by Ogden Lind-
sley (1964). His transactional view of person and res-
idential environment appeared 7 years before the
collection of papers that formed the first statement of
environmental psychology (Kates & Wohlwill, 1966).
Students of institutions still use actively the three
contextual dimensions posited by Kleemeier, which
he called the segregate, the congregate, and the con-
trol aspects of the milieu (e.g., Kahana, 1982). I
should like to end this attribution with a quotation
that my colleagues and I must have paraphrased
dozens of times: "One of the first tasks of research
conceived within this [environmental] framework
1
Kleemeier Lecture, presented at the 35th Annual Scientific Meeting of
the Gerontological Society, Boston, November 20,1982. Special thanks are
due Frances M. Carp and Stanley J. Brody for their comments on earlier
versions of the paper. The assistance of Arthur Waldman, Bernard Liebo-
witz, Lucille Nahemow, Morton Kleban, Elaine Brody, Miriam Moss, and
Sandra Howell in various phases of the research supported here was major.
Some of the thoughts first were presented in the Kesten Award Lecture,
Andrus Cerontology Center, University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, 1978.
2
Philadelphia Geriatric Center, 5301 Old York Road, Philadelphia, PA
19141.
would be the development of dimensional scales
which would define more precisely the setting char-
acteristics" (Kleemeier, 1961, p. 304).
Despite advances in measurement since then, Bob
would probably be disappointed with what the past
two decades have netted in this respect. However, I
expect that he would be pleased with the extent to
which the academic advancement committee of the
behavioral sciences has affirmatively recruited the
environment into full academic rank.
My task is to review my own work in a way that
shows the environment as only one component of a
total behavioral system. I shall discuss a quadripartite
concept that I have called "the good life," the mem-
bers of which are sectors called behavioral compe-
tence, psychological well-being, perceived quality of
life, and objective environment. The good life is a
grandiose construct, presuming to account for all of
life. Indeed, the implication is that the good life (and
its polar opposite, the bad life) subsumes all that we
define as legitimate personal and social goals. Its
sectors together include every aspect of behavior,
environment, and experience.
By using the term "good" I obviously mean to con-
vey the idea that whatever falls into these four sectors
is capable of being evaluated in terms of its positive
to negative quality. The evaluation of such constructs
has been the focus of much of my research. Thus, I
shall describe a model of the good life and define it in
terms of the dimensions by which I and others have
tried to operationalize it. The good life is explicitly
intended as a metaconstruct to which the four sec-
tors contribute, both independently and in mutual
fashion.
Although the four sectors of the good life are re-
lated, I shall begin by defining and describing each
separately, using this structure as a base for review-
ing some relevant findings from my research. As you
will see, my favored approach has been to work to
develop a taxonomy within each sector, with the

Vol. 23, No. 4, 1983 349

rationale that a necessary beginning for theory is
good description together with some understanding
of how the elements of description fit together. A
major goal of my work has been to search for ways to
assess how good or how bad life is in each sector.
Behavioral Competence
"Competence" has been used by many investiga-
tors to define desirable personal qualities, presum-
ably lying within the individual and occasioning the
exhibition of adaptive behavior. My definition (Law-
ton, 1982a) was, "the theoretical upper limit of ca-
pacity of the individual to function in the areas of bio-
logical health, sensation and perception, motor
behavior, and cognition" (p.38). These constructs,
however, are usually not directly measurable. There-
fore one way to measure competence is to define
behaviors that imply the presence of some element
of competence. Most such behaviors are, in fact,
actual performance rather than ability. Thus, breath-
ing, walking, or caring for one's physical needs may
be indicators of good health; performance on an
intelligence test or time taken to solve a problem are
behavioral indicators of intelligence; behaviors ex-
hibited by nonpatients and not by patients become
indicators of ego strength.
A technology for the assessment of competence
has developed over the years. The most elaborate
assessment systems such as the Duke OARS (Duke
University, 1978), the Comprehensive Assessment
and Referral Evaluation of Gurland et al. (1977-1978),
or the Aging Needs Survey in Manitoba (Havens &
Thompson, 1976) attempt to evaluate a number of
domains of behavioral competence.
The Philadelphia Geriatric Center Multilevel
Assessment Instrument (MAI) is another such
measurement device (Lawton, et al., 1982) which
attempts to assess the most important behavioral do-
mains with the most efficient resources. The first task
in designing the MAI was to define the most impor-
tant behavioral-competence categories that should
be included in any comprehensive assessment sys-
tem. The body of literature in assessment led to a
good consensus that health, functional health,
cognition, time use, and social behavior formed a
usable minimal set of such categories. In an attempt
to impose some order on these behavioral-
competence sectors and their relationships to one
another I proposed a hierarchy of categories (as re-
vised in Figure 1), based on the complexity of the
behaviors, within which specific behaviors relevant
to living in the real world could be categorized (Law-
ton, 1972). The domains of behavior progress in their
minimal levels of complexity from left to right, this
relative complexity being indicated by the elevation
of the bottom of each of the columns. Within each
domain, sublevels of complexity may also be dif-
ferentiated; examples of behaviors falling at different
levels of complexity within each domain are shown.
Although behaviors in different domains may be re-
lated to one another, their relative vertical height is
relevant only within a domain, not across domains.
350
No existing instrument or battery is capable of dis-
criminating quality of performance from very low to
very high competence for every domain and level of
complexity. However, Figure 1 schematizes the
range of behaviors that the ideal assessment instru-
ment should include.
Assessment evaluates the quality of the person's
behavior in each of the domains. To represent this
evaluative element in the model, a third dimension is
necessary, where the height of the solid represents
the assessed adaptive quality of the behavior, as
judged by social standards ("normative compe-
tence," Lawton, 1972).
The MAI contains interview- or informant-based
measures of each of these domains divided into sub-
scales that may be used alone or summed as overall
domain scores: self-rated health, health behavior,
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health conditions, self-maintaining activities of daily
living; instrumental activities of daily living; mental
status, cognitive symptoms; time use (enriching ac-
tivities); family interaction, and friends' interaction.
This array represents only a limited number of all the
possible behaviors that could be evaluated, but it is a
basic list that meets many of the assessment needs
encountered in both research and service-delivery
settings. The hierarchy itself serves as a guide to the
location of other behaviors for which special-
purpose instruments may be required. For example,
the assessment of range of motion, so critical to re-
habilitation efforts, constitutes a more differentiated
subset of activities of daily living and could be added
to the basic MAI. Another example is "social integra-
tion," an aspect of behavioral competence very high
in the complexity dimension of social behavior, for
which appropriate measures could be devised (Liang
et al., 1980).
The MAI includes but does not require scales for
trained professionals to perform overall integrative
ratings for each domain. Therefore, it can be admin-
istered and scored by a variety of people, from re-
search assistants to case-management aides. Further,
it was designed with a short, medium, and full-length
form for each scale and subscale. Each scale may be
used separately, so that, if time is short, the most
efficient evaluation may be done.
For the present purpose, however, the specific
characteristics of the MAI are less important than the
principle which states that all behavior is capable of
being located along a hierarchy of complexity and
evaluated in terms of its normative competence.
Psychological Well-being
Psychological well-being, the next sector of the
good life, is one's subjective evaluation of the overall
quality of one's inner experience. Other things being
equal, the common wisdom is that we would rather
feel good or neutral than feel distressed. Such an
evaluation is thus private, but we sometimes attempt
to assess psychological well-being by proxy when we
ask an observer to estimate another person's subjec-
tive state. The long history of attempts to name and
measure this construct cannot be reviewed here. The
The Gerontologist
 COMPLEX
Creative Creotive Creative
Innovation Innovation Leadership,
Love,Parent-
hood, Altru-
Problem istic Behavior
Solving

Exploration
Symbolic Nurturonce
Thinking

Operant
Conditioning Intimacy
Recreotion

Clossicol
Conditioning Cosual
Paid Contact
Curiosity
Employment
Memory

Fmonciol Sensory
Management Stimulus Contoct
Perception
Variation
Body
Instrumental
System ADL Sensory
Reception

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Orgon Physical
ADL

Cell

SIMPLE
HEALTH FUNCTIONAL COGNITION TIME SOCIAL
HEALTH USE BEHAVIOR

Figure 1. Hierarchy of behavioral competence.

Neugarten, Havighurst, and Tobin (1961) Life Satis-
faction Indices (LSI), Bradburn's (1969) Affect Balance
Scale, and my (Lawton, 1975) Philadelphia Geriatric
Center Morale Scale are three of the most-frequently
used instruments to measure psychological well-
being in the aged at present.
A major research issue has been whether psycho-
logical well-being represents a single construct that
can be measured by many indicators or whether it is
multidimensional. If it is the latter, we do an injustice
to the person in attempting to represent psychologi-
cal well-being as a single score composed of highly
varied indicators. In an attempt to pursue this ques-
tion, I concluded from a recent review of the litera-
ture on psychological well-being (Lawton, 1982b) that
four domains have appeared frequently enough in
diverse research to warrant being thought of as sepa-
rate consensual aspects of psychological well-being:
Neuroticism or negative affect includes anxiety,
depression, agitation, worry, pessimism, and other
clearly distressing psychological symptoms (Brad-
burn, 1969; Lawton, 1975).
Happiness represents a cognitive judgment of the
pervasiveness of positive affects over a relatively long
but indefinite time interval (Bradburn, 1969; Gurin et
al., 1960; Kozma & Stones, 1980).
Positive affect is a contemporary and time-limited
feeling of active pleasure, a description of an emo-
tional state more than a cognitive judgment (Brad-
burn, 1969; Kozma & Stones, 1980).
Congruence between desired and attained goals
was an essential element of the LSI (Neugarten et al.,
1961) and has been the only recurrent factor obtained
by different investigators in a series of factor-analytic
studies of that instrument (reviewed in Lawton,
1982b).
The problem with concluding that such a consen-
sus exists on these four dimensions is that no single
research has worked with content representing all of
these and other constructs. Kleban and I attempted
this task in a study of a purposive sample of about 300
older people of widely varying presumed levels of
psychological well-being (Lawton & Kleban, 1982).
We found very strong multi-item factors represent-
ing negative affect and happiness and less strong
ones that were clearly identifiable as positive affect
and congruence. Other factors were denial, social
ease, and two related to self-esteem in that some of
the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (1965) items were
split between them. Other theoretically promising
factors were sought but failed to appear as empirical-
ly clustered items: age-related morale, cognitive
symptoms, futurity, or psychophysiological symp-
toms.
Psychological well-being thus seems to be capable
of further differentiation in terms of negative affect,
happiness, positive affect, and congruence. Where
does this leave our favorite global constructs like
satisfaction and morale? I do not have relevant find-
ings, but Liang and Bollen (1983) have produced evi-
dence to justify both the unidimensional and the
multidimensional view of psychological well-being;
that is, negative affect and age-related morale appear
to be stable and separate dimensions of the PGC
Morale Scale, but the hypothesis that they are sepa-
rate aspects of an overall second-order factor,
morale, was also upheld. Liang & Bollen's work and
ours imply that people may be ranged on a dimen-
sion of general psychological well-being, but for
some purposes it may be worth differentiating
among its components. I shall return to this problem
later with some empirical data.

Vol. 23, No. 4, 1983 351

Perceived Quality of Life
The third sector of the good life is perceived quality
of life, the set of evaluations that a person makes
about each major domain of his or her life. As in the
case of general psychological well-being, one may
confidently assert that most of us would rather not be
grossly dissatisfied in any domain, although we might
not all agree that a state of satisfaction is a universal
goal. The best-known research in this area was done
by Campbell etal. (1976) and by Andrews and Withey
(1976). Both research teams investigated people's
satisfaction with self, family, friends, activities, work,
income, neighborhood, housing, and so on. They
also explored the relationship between satisfaction
in these areas and generalized psychological well-
being in addition to how these satisfactions varied
with important statuses such as age, marital status,
race, and so on.
Although no attempt has been made to develop a
taxonomy or a theoretical rationale for the choice of
domains, there is reasonably good consensus that 12
to 16 domains cover the aspects of life that are most
salient to most people. There are, of course, prob-
lems in assessing perceived quality of life. Campbell
et al. (1976), Carp (1975), Herzog and Rodgers (1981)
and others have shown that people's general tenden-
cy to proclaim themselves satisfied may be accentu-
ated in the elderly. A variety of mechanisms such as
denial, dissonance reduction, or ego defense may
moderate older people's critical evaluations of their
daily lives. Lowered aspiration and poverty of com-
parison standards have been shown to increase ex-
pressed satisfaction (Campbell et al., 1976). Despite
the limitations of satisfaction ratings in estimating
absolute levels of evaluation, the work of Campbell
et al. (1976) and many others shows that comparing
perceived satisfaction responses across domains or
across subpopulations (Lawton, 1977) can partially
overcome the methodological limitations of this
head-on approach to defining the good life.
My own research has not explored the perceived
quality of life sector in systematic fashion, but our
factor-analytic study of psychological well-being did
include indicators of satisfaction with four such do-
mains: housing and neighborhood, the use of time,
family, and friends. It was comforting to see that
none of these indicators fell into factors that we had
hypothesized to represent psychological well-being.
This separateness helps confirm that perceived quali-
ty of life and psychological well-being are separate
sectors. It was also comforting to see residential satis-
faction and time-use satisfaction emerge as identifi-
able factors but discomforting to observe that satis-
faction with family and satisfaction with friends did
not form statistically coherent clusters. Of the three
sectors discussed thus far, perceived quality of life is
most in need of further development of measure-
ment methods.
Objective Environment
The last sector of the good life is the objective
environment. There has been a tradition of attempt-
352
ing to characterize the environment in terms of its
presumed positive or negative effect on the average
person. A variety of economic indicators such as the
stock average, the gross national product, new build-
ing starts, or the unemployment rate all presumably
reflect external conditions that have a high, although
not absolute, probability of affecting the economic
well-being of people in favorable or unfavorable
ways. Similarly, social indicators such as infant mor-
tality, disease morbidity rates, housing dilapidation,
the crime rate, and so on (U.S. Bureau of the Census,
1977; U.S. Department of Health, Education and Wel-
fare, 1969) have been sought to reflect the quality of
other aspects of life.
Pointing to the "out-there" quality of the environ-
ment constitutes the first defining feature of this con-
ception of environment. Whatever else it is, it lies
outside the individual and is capable of being
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counted or rated consensually by observers other
than the subjects, or measured in centimeters,
grams, and seconds. It seems essential to separate
this "objective" environment from the manner in
which the environment is experienced by the indi-
vidual. The environment as perceived by the person
is of great interest but is a domain of perceived quali-
ty of life, not of the objective environment. For exam-
ple, the variable "number of people per room" is an
objective environmental characteristic, whereas
"crowding" is an experienced, perceived quality of
life characteristic. Most existing attempts to develop
a useful taxonomy of the environment are very primi-
tive indeed. Some time ago I suggested a set of basic
distinctions that should be made when we speak of
"the environment" (Lawton, 1970):
— The physical environment, whether natural or man-
made;
— The personal environment, composed of the indi-
viduals who play some significant social role in relation to
the subject;
— The small-group environment, an aggregate of two or
more people with whom the person interacts (usually face-
to-face);
— The suprapersonal environment, which refers to the
dominant characteristics of the aggregate of other indi-
viduals in physical proximity to the subject (i.e., their aver-
age age, socioeconomic status, most-prevalent race, and
so on).
— The social environment, composed of the major so-
cial-institutional, normative, and cultural forces to which
the individual is exposed.
Standardized measures for many aspects of en-
vironment have not been developed. Some exam-
ples of objective measures include the Census
Bureau's list of housing deficiencies (U.S. Bureau of
the Census, 1977), the square footage of a dwelling
unit, the crime rate of a neighborhood, the number
of close relatives a person possesses, or the age mix-
ture of an apartment building. In our own research
on older Jewish people in an urban slum, some basic
observer-rated characteristics of the neighborhood
were factored: clusters of environmental attributes
named Jewish concentration, distance from facilities,
busy location, neighborhood quality and block quali-
The Gerontologist
ty were obtained. They accounted for a significant
proportion of variance in the motility of people in
their neighborhood (Lawton & Cohen, 1974a). Re-
search of this type has more recently been pursued
vigorously by Carp and Carp (in press), Moos and
Lemke (1980), and Windley and Scheidt (1982), each
of whom has striven for an environmental taxonomy
based on higher-order dimensions that can be mea-
sured independently of people's perceptions. This
work is still in its infancy, however. Kleemeier's ver-
dict would probably be, "Good try, so far."
The Relationships Among the Good Lives
I have thus far deliberately avoided dealing with
the interrelationships among the sectors of the good
life. Of course, they are related. In fact, one of the
main occupations of researchers is to look for the
effects of variation in one sector on well-being in
another sector. Where the research deals with poli-
cies, programs, or services, a very usual approach is
to evaluate the program in terms of whether it can
affect an increase in some sector of the good life
other than its own. A typical question is, "Does X
program, in addition to serving people with X need,
also make a person more active, more satisfied with
several domains of life quality, or more satisfied with
life in general?" I shall discuss further how adequate
each sector is in representing the good life and men-
tion in passing some of the empirically-confirmed
relationships between sectors that have come from
my research.
The competent performance of complex behaviors
has been assumed to represent one aspect of the
good life. Is this a tenable assumption? For the lower
levels of physical and functional health, cognition,
and perhaps instrumental skills, this generalization
would be acceptable to all, but in the more complex
domains of time use and social behavior the social-
normative element intrudes increasingly. What
about individual needs and tastes, or the capacity of
the environment to support or inhibit competent
behavior? For example, some of us do not wish to
interact with people while others may be unable to
do so because of environmental barriers. For them, a
low level of social interaction could not legitimately
be construed as indicating low competence in this
area. Although socially-defined "normative compe-
tence" (Lawton, 1972) is one element of a positive
lifestyle, even in the time use and social areas, wide
variations that exist in the degree to which normative
competence describes individual goals leaves the
good life incompletely defined by behavioral compe-
tence alone. A test of the varying centrality of the
domains of behavioral competence may be seen in
their correlations with psychological well-being in
the research that produced the MAI (Lawton et al.,
1982). Health correlated highest (.57) and social be-
havior the lowest (.23), while functional health,
cognition, and time use were intermediate in their
covariation with psychological well-being. Much
more modest, but significant, correlations were
observed between behavioral competence and both
Vol. 23, No. 4, 1983 353
perceived quality of life and objective environment.
A phenomenological view would suggest that the
only true measure of the goodness of existence lies in
the individual's personal assessment of his or her life,
as in psychological well-being, rather than in the
behavior that he or she presents in public. Yet, we
have every reason to be dissatisfied with both the
ability of the person to articulate how he or she "real-
ly" feels and the ability of the instruments themselves
to represent these nuances. Psychological well-being
is thus both a flawed and an incomplete indicator of
the good life, but one whose centrality has been
affirmed repeatedly in the research literature.
How can we also avoid considering whether a per-
son feels that his or her life is good in the different
environmental and interpersonal contexts where it is
lived? The gerontological literature is full of demon-
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strations suggesting that amount of satisfaction with
a domain of life is a stronger determinant of psycho-
logical well-being than is an objective indicator of
quality in that same domain (e.g., Liang et al., 1980).
In our analyses of all of our own and others' data sets
we have found substantial correlations between per-
ceived quality of life in a domain and the indicator of
behavioral competence in the relevant domain.
Psychological well-being has also been shown to be
related to perceived quality of life in virtually every
domain (Lawton, 1978).
Some aspects of the objective environment can be
clearly characterized as desirable or undesirable.
Lack of complete plumbing facilities, the total ab-
sence of any relatives, residence in a high-crime
neighborhood, or daily exposure to institutional rac-
ism are examples of negative attributes in the objec-
tive environmental domains. Although the source of
their characterization as negative is ultimately the
judgment of individual persons, consensus on these
judgments is so high that one becomes willing to
accept the aggregate negative evaluation as "objec-
tive." We should probably agree not only that they
are negative but that their presence could be taken as
an indicator of "the bad life," regardless of whether
they were associated with behavioral competence or
psychological well-being. However, it is often more
difficult to assert that particular environmental attri-
butes are favorable or unfavorable than to make such
assertions regarding indicators of behavioral compe-
tence or psychological well-being. Rather, the favor-
able or unfavorable quality of some aspects of the
environment frequently remain to be discovered in
terms of their association with desirable behavioral
or psychological outcomes. Because so much of my
research has been concentrated in the environmen-
tal arena, I shall cite briefly and in highly selective
fashion a few findings from this research that illus-
trate these cross-sector relationships. Similar docu-
mentation would be easy to provide for every pair of
sectors; space limitations do not permit such ex-
tended discussion.
Objective Environment and Behavioral Competence
The press-competence model of adaptation and
aging developed by Nahemow and myself suggests
that for some people an increment in environmental
quality should lead to an increment in behavioral
competence (Lawton & Nahemow, 1973). Planned
housing for the elderly and institutions are environ-
mental types that, being purpose-built, lend them-
selves naturally to the incorporation of social and
physical design features that could affect compe-
tence. In a study of people before and after moving to
five new housing projects, their participation in activ-
ities increased compared to that of people who did
not make such a move (Lawton & Cohen, 1974b). In a
cross-sectional study of 3,000 tenants in 150 such
projects, living in a project with a larger proportion of
age peers (Teaff et al., 1978) or a more age-dense local
neighborhood (Lawton & Nahemow, 1979a) was
associated with greater activity. Although the size
(number of units) of one's project was unrelated to
well-being, living in a taller building was associated
with less travel outside the housing environment, as
if the vertical distance were a barrier to the full use of
the local neighborhood (Lawton et al., 1975).
Objective Environment and Perceived Quality of Life
We are continually surprised at how relatively low
the relationships between objective and subjective
environmental evaluations are, but such rela-
tionships do usually exist. In our MAI study, for ex-
ample, dollar income and perceived adequacy of in-
come were correlated at the .26 level while observer-
and self-rated housing quality showed a .34 correla-
tion (Lawton et al., 1982). In the large cross-sectional
study of housing we were able to identify a number of
SEX
AGE
INCOME
EDUCA-
TION
Figure 2. Structural model of well-being (LISREL estimates).
354
physical aspects of the housing that appeared to lead
to increased general housing satisfaction: total
amount of kitchen storage, amount of counter space,
amount of closet space, presence of a private yard or
balcony, an electric (versus gas) stove, and others
(Lawton & Nahemow, 1979b). Finally an analysis of
the HUD — Bureau of the Census Annual Housing
Survey data tapes revealed that an index composed
of 23 physical indicators of housing quality showed a
correlation of .38 with the occupant's satisfaction
with his housing (Lawton, 1980).
Objective Environmental Quality and Psychological
Well-being
It is expecting a great deal of an objective environ-
mental attribute to have an across-the-board direct
effect on psychological well-being. However, just
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such an effect was found to be associated with mov-
ing into planned housing (Lawton & Cohen, 1974b),
with living in a project with a high age concentration
in both housing and neighborhood (Lawton & Nake-
mow, 1979a; Teaff et al., 1978), and with neighbor-
hood crime rate (Lawton et al., 1980).
A reasonable conclusion is that well-being in one
sector has a good chance of being reflected in one or
more of the other sectors. But there is still more to be
learned about such relationships — that is, how they
relate to one another in concert. Thus, Kleban and I
set up a hypothetical model of well-being, using mea-
sures of as many of the constructs as we had in our
MAI data set. The most basic elements of behavioral
competence (health, cognition, and functional
health) were predicted to influence friends' interac-
44
The Gerontologist
tion and time use, which in turn should predict
psychological well-being as measured by the PCC
Morale Scale. Family interaction, not an element of
basic competence, is determined by factors outside
the model. Objective environment was suggested to
influence friends interaction, activities, and psycho-
logical well-being, both directly and indirectly
through environmental satisfaction. All of these fac-
tors were examined while controlling for the basic
background characteristics shown at the far left of
Figure 2. It shows an overall confirmation of this
model, with a few misses. The three misses are a lack
of environmental influence on time use and the un-
expected significant paths from family contact to
friends contact and from cognition to psychological
well-being. This model represents only the behavior-
al competence sector in multidimensional fashion.
We need to represent the real complexity of the
other sectors in similar fashion.
A partial approach to such an exploration of
psychological well-being was taken by testing similar
causal models using positive and negative affect as
the ultimate dependent variables. The two models
(explicated further in Lawton, in press) showed, as
predicted, different relationships among their ele-
ments. Specifically, positive affect, as hypothesized,
was strongly determined by the outwardly-focused
behaviors (time use and friends interaction) but very
little by health. Conversely, negative affect was
strongly determined by health but not by time use or
friends interaction, as we had hypothesized. Thus an
excellent reason is found for distinguishing between
the positive and negative varieties of psychological
well-being.
It is clear that the total amount of predictability of
psychological well-being is relatively low. Even in this
truncated model that represents only a few compo-
nents of the good life, however, relationships among
the sectors of the good life are evident. Figure 3 is a
rough attempt to illustrate the relative amount of
overlap among the sectors. The relative sizes of the
grey areas represent the median correlations be-
PSYCHOLOGICAL PERCEIVED
QUALITY
WELLBEING
OF LIFE
BEHAVIORAL OBJECTIVE
COMPETENCE ENVIRONMENT
Figure 3. Four sectors of the good life.
Vol.23, No. 4,1983
tween domains of two sectors of the good life; these
bivariate correlations were obtained from our analy-
ses of five large data sets. The relatively low predicta-
bility between sectors is obviously in part a function
of measurement error. Those of us who work with
large data sets from heterogeneous populations have
learned to be grateful for one percent of explained
variance!
The kernel of my message, however, is that lack of
predictability from one sector of well-being to
another, even if we reduce measurement error to its
bare minimum, is the normal state of affairs to be
expected for the human condition. Specifically I sug-
gest that the relative autonomy among sectors is what
makes normal human existence possible. If a change
in one sector were to be immediately reflected in
every other sector, chaotic instability would be the
result. The idea of relative autonomy among systems
Downloaded from http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Michigan on October 17, 2014
is well-known in the biological sciences. For the be-
havioral system each sector of the good life has its
own structure and its own legitimacy as a goal for
individuals and for society as a whole. Our usual
practice is to look for, expect, and feel disappointed
if we do not obtain huge correlations between our
measures in different sectors. We must learn to be
more discriminating in our expectations, which in
turn will lead to better science.
It would be possible to cite illustrations of disjunc-
tions between every combination of sectors. First let
us consider a few examples of people whose good
life in one sector is unmatched in the others:
1) High behavioral competence is clearly man-
ifested in the activist behavior of a Grey Panther. Yet
her environment may be deprived, she may be dis-
satisfied with her milieu, and she may be unable to
achieve a sense of internal happiness as long as the
unjust gap between ideal and actuality remains.
, 2) Some people can maintain psychological well-
being even in the face of physical illness and its be-
havioral concomitants, an objectively unrewarding
situation, and a judgment that the world outside one-
self has little to offer one—this is "integrity," in the
Eriksonian (1963) sense.
3) Even if one's competence is eroded, one lives
where most people would prefer not to live, and
one's subjective mental state is negative, there may
nevertheless be some adaptive value in looking on
the bright side of the domains of perceived quality of
life. Some people in nursing homes give this impres-
sion; when asked how things are, the answer is "It's
fine—I have to like it." I suggest that the liking is not
necessarily false but may be a psychologically posi-
tive way of dealing with what would otherwise be a
worse situation.
4) Perhaps the most familiar disjunctive type is the
behaviorally and psychologically impaired person
whose functioning and subjective state even the best
of objective environments cannot improve.
The same point can be illustrated by thinking of
impairments in one sector that are not reflected in
others:
355
 1) Some senile dementia patients whose behavior
is grossly impaired nonetheless appear to be satisfied
and in good psychological health, perhaps enhanced
by a favorable environment.
2) Depressed people may retain a high level of
behavioral competence, live in the best of environ-
ments, and evaluate positively every domain of their
daily lives except themselves.
3) On the other hand, some individuals are chroni-
cally dissatisfied. Regardless of their own compe-
tence, their internally positive psychological well-
being, or the objective quality of their environment,
they are hypercritical of some or all domains of their
external life.
4) Finally, the world is full of older people who live
in very stressful or very deprived environments, yet
manage to remain "up" in every other way.
An important corollary of this conclusion regard-
ing intersector autonomy is that one should not insist
on demonstrating that an improvement in one sector
of well-being should lead to improvement in another
sector (Carp, 1977; Rosow, 1977; Taylor, 1977). Trans-
lating the good life into social goals, well-being in the
different sectors might be looked upon as the right to
health, happiness, satisfaction with daily life, and a
good environment. Does it make sense to suggest
that in order to justify our attempts to improve one of
these sectors we must show that its effects are re-
flected in another sector? Sometimes we can, but we
should not be surprised or consider our program a
failure if we cannot. Above all we must insist on the
right of each person to define his idiosyncratic life
goals and to eschew the neatness of total congruence
among elements of the good life if he wishes.
As this presentation nears its end, it may seem
somewhat surprising that this psychologist has never
mentioned self. That is because I saved it for last, not
because it is last in importance. The self is where the
ultimate meaning of the four sectors is stored. The
exercise of behavioral competence builds perceived
competence. The varieties of psychological well-
being are reflections of the self. Perceived quality of
life may be seen as the net of one's evaluation of the
congruence between self and the external world. The
objective environment is most distant from the self,
but where it is salient to the person it may be the
symbol of her competence and generativity, as in a
long-occupied home.
The self, however, is indicated only indirectly and
in a glancing fashion by the many measurable attri-
butes from the sectors of the good life. The self is
inaccessible to measurement directly (misnamed
measures such as self-esteem notwithstanding) but it
may be thought of as the repository of the most
meaningful aspects of the good life. If all four sectors
channel into the self, the self in turn thrusts outward,
providing the motive force that constantly conditions
behavioral competence, psychological well-being,
perceived quality of life, and the portion of the objec-
tive environment that is actively shaped by the per-
son. Perhaps the small dark area of Fig. 3 where all
four sectors overlap is one way to represent the self.
356
Now to end this lecture where Kleemeier began, it
is worth calling to everyone's attention the fact that
he probably got as close as any gerontologist has to
the elusive self. A substantial portion of his Hand-
book chapter is devoted to what he called "the body
as an environmental object" (1959, p. 401). The "body
image" construct was popular at that time and has
been used very effectively as an aid to self-
exploration by Butler (1963) in his technique of inter-
viewing older people before a full-length mirror. Un-
like the physical environmental p o r t i o n of
Kleemeier's contribution, which has been taken up
by many of us over the past two decades, the internal
environment has been relatively neglected. It is very
possible that there is as much potential for new be-
havioral knowledge in the exploration of the body as
a stimulus object to oneself and to others as there has
been in the exploration of the external environment.
Downloaded from http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Michigan on October 17, 2014
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I IT Chicago-Kent College of Law

is pleased to announce the opening of

The Law and Aging Library

The Law and Aging Library
provides a unique resource that
has been developed and will be
maintained for the purposes of:
• Enhancing the legal commu-
nity's awareness and under-
standing of gerontological
issues and of an aging
clientele
• Enhancing the social sciences
community's understanding of
how the Constitution, statutes,
regulations, and case law
apply to the lives and problems
of the elderly and of those
who interact with them.
Initially funded by a grant from
the Retirement Research Foun-
dation, The Law and Aging
Library—the first of its kind in the
nation—includes more than
1,500 books and journals, and it
will continue to grow. Access to
the collection is available nation-
wide through the national inter-
library loan program. The sev-
eral-hundred-page catalogue of
the collection, to be periodically
updated, may be purchased at
cost.
For further information, write to
or call:
Howard Eglit, Director
312/567-5037
Georgia Strohm, Chief Librarian
312/567-3147
I IT Chicago-Kent College of Law
77 South Wacker Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60606

Vol.23, No. 4,1983 357