Valerie Møller

Biography

"VALERIE MØLLER is Professor Emeritus at Rhodes University. She was appointed to the new chair of Quality of Life Studies at Rhodes in the Institute of Social and Economic Research in 2007. Before that she was director of ISER (1998–2006) and headed the Quality of Life Research Unit at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, in the 1990s. She grew up in the southern United States and Switzerland. A sociologist by training, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Zürich. She and her architect husband arrived in Africa in 1972 in a VW kombi and stayed. She has lived and worked in southern Africa since that time. Together with South African colleagues, she initiated the South African Quality of Life (SAQoL) trends study that has tracked the personal well-being of South Africans from all walks of life since the early 1980s. In 1996 and 2004, together with Alex Michalos, editor of the leading international journal on quality-of-life, Social Indicators Research, she organised ‘roving conferences’ to promote social indicators and quality-of-life research among South African scholars. The 2004 ‘Roving Conference’ held at Rhodes University formed part of the University’s Centenary celebrations. Valerie Møller has published some 200 research articles, chapters in books, and research monographs covering a wide range of topics related to quality of life and well-being. She has edited or co-edited a number of Springer volumes on quality-of-life topics including two focusing on South African quality of life (published in 1997 and 2007). She is an International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS) Fellow, hosted the ISQOLS 7th conference at Rhodes University in 2006, and served as ISQoL’s President (2007–8). She serves on the boards of a number of quality-of-life journals and received the 1997 (with Lawrence Schlemmer) and 2013 Best Social Indicator Research (SIR) Paper awards. The 2013 Best SIR Paper reported on three decades of the SAQoL trends study. "

Research Interest

Quality of life and well-being