Basic considerations in the assessment of an individual's quality of life include: (1) the nature of the scales used for reporting; (2) the domains included in the overall assessment and their relative importance to the individual; (3) the time frame of the reporting period as either stated or implied; (4) the extent to which the personal report is influenced by relatively extraneous factors; and (5) the extent of agreement between subjective and objective measures of well-being. Scales used in assessing the quality of life include degree of satsifaction on a seven-point scale, extent to which needs and wants are met on a five-point scale, and extent to which each of a large number of descriptive sentences applies on a three-point scale. Samples of domains have ranged from small sets of 10 or 15 areas to up to 200 specific items. Procedures such as the critical incident technique and multi-variate analysis have been used to select the final set of domains. (Author)