Quality of life.
Uncovering what it is and how to find it has been the mission for Alex Michalos, professor emeritus of political science at UNBC, for more than half a century.
The four volume collection, Philosophical Foundations of Quality of Life: Selected Works of Alex C. Michalos, is set to be published later this month.
"The central aim of this set of volumes is to describe and explain the context and connections among a sub-set of papers and books produced over the past 50 years," Michalos said.
"What I have been doing since the late '60s as a pragmatist and consequentialist from a philosophical point of view, is trying to define and measure the dependent variable in searches for a good life or a good quality of life, what some people call general well-being now," Michalos told the International Journal of Wellbeing in 2014.
"It involved developing measurements of quality of life for use by policy makers and individuals planning their own lives."
The collection of his work was his publisher's idea.
"They wanted my work all in one place and they thought, and I thought, that would be neat," Michalos said.
"I published a collection called Essays on the Quality of life containing 20 articles focused on the quality of life, three of which appear in other volumes of this set because they seemed to be so central to the array of issues in the 70 articles in these volumes."
And the second half of Volume 3 and most of Volume 4 are related to Prince George and British Columbia."
"A lot of the empirical work was done while I was director of the Institute for Social Research and Evaluation at UNBC so there are several papers on Prince George and British Columbia."
Michalos is now retired and living in Ottawa with his wife of 34 years, Deborah Poff, a former UNBC vice-president and provost.
Before moving to Prince George, Michalos and Poff had a long-distance marriage for about 11 years.
"Prince George came along and it brought us together. We were both able to work there together and it was a chance to start again. And we were imbedded into the community very well," Michalos said.
"And also for me, it was also an opportunity to help build the university from scratch. It was a collaboration, an effort with various partners including the City of Prince George and the Health Board. It was a really good connection."
Michalos has published 27 books in total and 118 refereed articles.
He co-founded seven scholarly journals and was the editor of the 12-volume Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-being Research.
Michalos also founded the Journal of Business Ethics in 1982 and served as editor and chief until 2016.
A former UNBC chancellor, Michalos received the Order of Canada in 2010. Poff was appointed to the order last year.
