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.