Valerie Moller
Emeritus Professor, Chair of Quality of Life
Lic. Phil, Ph.D. (Zurich)
Contact:
v.moller@ru.ac.za
tel: +27 (46) 603 8917
fax: +27 (46) 622 3948
VALERIE MØLLER is Professor of Quality of Life Studies at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. Before that she was director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University (1998-2006) and headed the Quality of Life Research Unit at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, in the 1990s. Over the past thirty years she has studied South African quality-of-life by means of attitude and household surveys, in-depth and focus group interviews, time-use studies, and writing competitions. She has researched and written on social indicators and quality-of-life issues in connection with issues such as housing, development and service delivery, unemployment, return migration, intergenerational relations, non-contributory pensions and poverty, spare time use, food gardening, criminal victimisation, and among the youth and the elderly. Currently she is researching the impact on subjective well-being of the stigma attached to tuberculosis in the time of HIV/AIDS.
Together with colleagues she developed the first survey instruments to measure perceptions of personal well-being among South Africans from all walks of life in the early 1980s. Since this time the South African Quality of Life Trends Project has produced regular updates on the subjective well-being of South Africans for public information and policy purposes. In 1993 she successfully lobbied for the inclusion of a quality-of-life module in Statistics South Africa’s annual household survey for international comparison and she was among the international researchers who persuaded StatsSA to add a time-budget study to their repertoire. In 1998, she developed the core items for South Africa’s first large-scale city quality-of-life study for greater Durban. She is actively engaged in training young researchers in practical research skills.
Valerie Møller has guest-edited two special issues of Springer’s Social Indicators Research on South African quality of life in 1997 and 2007. She has published some 100 research articles in peer-reviewed international journals and chapters in books. In 1997, together with Lawrence Schlemmer, she was awarded the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies’ Social Indicators Research best paper award for their article on the challenges facing South Africa in the democratic era. In 2000, she was named ISQOLS Fellow. She hosted the society’s 7th annual conference in South Africa in 2006 and is currently its president for the period 2007-2008.
Valerie Moller
