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 p roviders. This review concerns the determinants of such satisfaction and em beds this literature within the Homeostatic Theory of Subjective Well-Being . This posits that life satisfaction is under considerable endogenous contr ol and, as a consequence, does not normally vary in sympathy with changes i n the external environment. This situation changes, however, if the environ ment is sufficiently aversive to defeat such homeostatic control. Under the se conditions the circumstances of living correlate with life satisfaction as they wrest control away from the homeostatic system. One important impli cation is that the measure of life satisfaction may or may not be a sensiti ve indicator for changes in service provision, depending on the functional status of the homeostatic system. (C) 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.