Living with support in the community: predictors of satisfaction with life

Ensuring that people with an intellectual disability have normative levels of life satisfaction is increasingly considered a worthy goal for service providers. This review concerns the determinants of such satisfaction and embeds this literature within the Homeostatic Theory of Subjective Well-Being. This posits that life satisfaction is under considerable endogenous control and, as a consequence, does not normally vary in sympathy with changes in the external environment. This situation changes, however, if the environment is sufficiently aversive to defeat such homeostatic control. Under these conditions the circumstances of living correlate with life satisfaction as they wrest control away from the homeostatic system. One important implication is that the measure of life satisfaction may or may not be a sensitive indicator for changes in service provision, depending on the functional status of the homeostatic system. MRDD Research Reviews 7:99-104, 2001. (c) 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.