Studying children in armed conflict: data production,social indicators and analysis

The authors seek to give an overview of ways in which social indicators relevant to research on children affected by armed conflict can be developed, and how such research can be carried out. Technical and methodological challenges involved in this pursuit are discussed. It is argued that data production must consider issues of definition and delineation of the phenomenon of war-affected children more actively than it does currently. An analytical approach is proposed, in which children’s characteristics in different situations, or in different stages of conflict, may be used as intakes to understanding how the social processes pertaining to life histories of children in armed conflict are created and reproduced.

Ways that Social Change Predicts Personal Quality of Life

A notable way that social change affects personal quality of life would rely on the person’s experience with social change. This experience may influence societal quality of life and quality of work life, which may in turn affect personal quality of life. Additionally, the experience of social change is possibly less detrimental to personal quality of life later in the presence of higher existing personal quality of life. These influences over time become transparent through a three-wave panel study of 531 working people in Hong Kong, China. Findings show that although social change experienced did not generally impair subsequent quality of life, it tended to be more detrimental to the person with lower quality of life before. In addition, social change experienced tended to erode societal quality of life and quality of work life experienced, which appeared to be predictors of personal quality of life. Hence, there are possible ways for social change to predict personal quality of life.     

An Anthropology of ‘The Good Life’ in the Bolivian Plateau

This paper addresses my understanding of well-being as harmonious relations in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. My approach shows the complexity of issues emerging when dealing with social relations. First of all, I analyse a specific case study showing the moral obligation involved among household members. Then I attempt to provide an insight into other aspects of social life to realise that the same degree of moral duty can be found when people participate in religious festivities or social protests. Collaboration, unity and co-operation often coexist with conflicts and moral obligation. The paper argues that this picture of complex coexistence is rather different from the substantive freedom described by Sen (Development as freedom. Oxford University Press, 1999) in his capability approach. By taking Sen’s theoretical framework as a point of departure for this investigation, it aims to emphasise the value of ethnography and other qualitative methods to the study of well-being. In the field of well-being, social interaction may greatly affect people’s capabilities to choose the lives they have reason to value, obliging them to follow certain models based on shared values and preferences. The paper contributes to debates on this specific issue, trying to shed light on the picture emerging when engaging with ethnographic research.

Quality of life indicators and health: Current status and emerging conceptions

Quality of life is an increasingly common theme in the health status and health promotion literatures. Six approaches that consider quality of life and health are reviewed. These are (a) health-related quality of life; (b) quality of life as social diagnosis in health promotion; (c) quality of life among persons with developmental disabilities; (d) quality of life as social indicators; (e) the Centre for Health Promotion (University of Toronto) model, and (f) Lindstrom's quality of life model. Each approach is considered as to its emphasis on objective or subjective indicators, individual or system-level measurement, value-laden or value-neutral assumptions, and potential relationship to social policy and social change goals. The links among the social indicators, quality of life, and health promotions areas are examined.     

Self-other orientations and quality of life

A theory, related measures, and series of studies are presented here which proffer a new approach to the study of quality of life. The approach is phenomenological. The quality of life evaluation is assumed to be in the eye of the experiencer. To facilitate the experiencer's communication, a non-verbal technique of measuring the personal meaning of events and environments is employed. A series of studies are described which emerge from this framework dealing with alienation; gain or loss of social status; love, marriage, and parenthood; and transitional states. Finally new uses of the approach are proposed.     

Preaching to the Choir: Are the Commission’s Recommendations Already Applied?

As we have seen, the Commission’s final report outlines a comprehensive framework by defining some guidelines by: (a) identifying the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress, including measurement problems; (b) considering what additional information might be required for the production of more relevant social progress indicators; and (c) assessing the feasibility of alternative measurement and presentation tools. The report argues that GDP should not be completely eliminated by the options for measuring progress, but must be integrated with other information. In particular, the Committee defines three major areas in which indicators should be developed: economic conditions, quality of life and sustainability. In the European scene, but not only, there are many initiatives that aim at measuring the progress of countries and well-being through different conceptual frameworks and by using several indicators. This work intends to analyze some of those relevant initiatives by comparing and confronting them to the Commission’s recommendations, in order to check what already fits the commission recommendations and what still needs to be defined in that perspective.     

Away from Dissatisfaction,Closer to Well-Being: A Multidimensional Synthetic Measure

As part of the international debate on methods for measuring the social progress of a population, there has been increasing interest in individual subjective opinions about different aspects of quality of life (elementary indicators). In the literature, many methods have been introduced for producing measures of subjective well-being based on these opinions. Some of these methods aim to construct synthetic measures that allow us to consider all the aspects simultaneously. This topic often requires subjective methodological choices and/or distributional assumptions and, when the opinions are encoded by means of categorical ordinal values, the eventual quantification of the original variables. Here, starting from the Istat multipurpose survey on households’—aspects of daily life, we propose an original method for constructing a global satisfaction index. We introduce a variable based on the joint distribution of all the elementary indicators that is able to express the individual degree of global satisfaction. This approach allows us to maintain the original ordinal data scale and to avoid any aggregation formula. By comparing the observed distribution of the new variable and the theoretical one, which refers to the situation of overall dissatisfaction (all individuals are dissatisfied for every aspect), we propose three indices of global satisfaction. We also implemented two simulation studies that confirms both the efficacy and robustness of our method. We then applied it to measure the global satisfaction degree of the Italian population, using Istat multipurpose survey data for the year 2013.     

Social indicators: A statistician's view

In the following we consider the problem areas of social indicator research which are of concern to the statistician and in which he can prove helpful. Among these are the purposes of social indicators, what social variables should be considered as conceivable variables related to quality of life, what data should be collected taking in account the difficulty of not being able to directly measure variables of interest, how does one collect the data (which is usually in the form of a time series) guarding against multicollinearity, and how should the collected data be handled and analyzed. We discuss why in social indicator research the secular trends, cyclical movements, seasonal variations and irregular fluctuations must be taken into account. Techniques are discussed for relating lead indicators in one time period to coincident indicators in another period. Finally we present a select bibliography in canonical correlation, forecasting, indicators and index numbers, path analysis, regression analysis, simulation techniques, time series analysis and other areas useful in analyzing social indicator data.     

Changes in quality of life perceptions in Saskatoon,Saskatchewan: comparing survey results from 2001 and 2004

There is a growing interest in quality of life (QoL) as an integrated approach to addressing key social, environmental and economic determinants of health. The University of Saskatchewan’s Community-University Institute for Social Research (CUISR) has examined the process and results of a multi-stakeholder approach to the ongoing sustainability of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan as a healthy city with an improving and a more equitably distributed QoL. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, this research has examined QoL across three locales in Saskatoon—representing Low, Middle and High socio-economic status neighbourhoods. Two large telephone surveys were conducted with residents of the city in 2001 and 2004. This paper presents the major findings from these two surveys according to four overarching research questions posed by the CUISR QoL team. The questions relate to a number of QoL issues including the socio-demographic characteristics of respondents, place related measures, aspects influencing excellent or very good QoL in Saskatoon and feelings of a strong sense of place. The paper also assesses the changes in the results of the four questions between 2001 and 2004.

Postnatal quality of life — A content analysis of qualitative results to the Mother-Generated Index

Background

The Mother-Generated Index (MGI) assesses postnatal quality of life (QoL) without providing a predefined checklist, thus offering mothers the opportunity to identify areas of life affected by having a baby.

An Empirical Analysis of the Interrelationship between Components of the Social Quality Theoretical Construct

Social quality has been presented as a theory that can explain economic and social progress of the daily lives of a population. The components of social quality include: socio-economic security, social inclusion, social cohesion and social empowerment. The social quality perspective views people as interacting within collective identities that provide the contexts of self-realisation. The paper tests the social quality theory by focusing on the relationship between social inclusion and social cohesion, the notion of social relations, to socio-economic security using the context of the family as a facilitator of self-realisation. Using data from the Israel Social Survey 2003, six indicators of socio-economic security were analysed. There was a small but positive and significant relationship between social inclusion and socio-economic security. We found no relationship between socio-economic security and social cohesion. These findings tend to undermine those aspects of social quality theory which posit close connections between these elements on a conceptual level.

The Social Indicators Movement at 50: Onwards in Unity or Divided?

Before we can move forward with new topics in quality of life research, it would be useful to settle a number of issues that have been a source of debate over the last 50 years. Broadly speaking, this leads to seven principles for measuring and describing quality of life: the central focus is on people; quality of life is about more than just economics; a full measurement must incorporate both objective and subjective indicators; quality of life incorporates several dimensions; the outcome must be viewed separately from the determinants; there must be attention for distribution and difference; the domains can be combined into an index (though this is not essential). The main debate is perhaps about whether or not there should be an index. An index is necessary if we wish to give social indicators the same status as economic indicators have through GDP. In my view, that is desirable. Once these principles are established, the agenda for future social indicators research can be shaped using a model-based approach incorporating several recommendations from Land and Michalos.     

MEASURING QUALITY OF LIFE: ECONOMIC,SOCIAL, AND SUBJECTIVE INDICATORS

Thinkers have discussed the “good life” and the desirable society for millennia. In the last decades, scientists offered several alternative approaches to defining and measuring quality of life: social indicators such as health and levels of crime, subjective well-being measures (assessing people's evaluative reactions to their lives and societies), and economic indices. These alternative indicators assess three philosophical approaches to well-being that are based, respectively, on normative ideals, subjective experiences, and the ability to select goods and services that one desires. The strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches are reviewed. It is argued that social indicators and subjective well-being measures are necessary to evaluate a society, and add substantially to the regnant economic indicators that are now favored by policy makers. Each approach to measuring the quality of life contains information that is not contained in the other measures.     

Short-term, population-based forecasting in the public sector

There has recently been a tremendous expansion of the range of problems to which the demographic perspective is applied. Development of a new population-based method to solve the problem of forecasting income assistance caseloads for the state of Washington represents yet another effort in which the demographic perspective helps solve two major public-policy problems: (1) providing accurate and useful forecasts of caseloads, and (2) creating a dynamic model with which to analyze alternative policy proposals. When forecasting or examining the caseload history, it is also common to look at these caseload levels as a time-series. A caseload grows and shrinks as time passes because new members enter the caseload from a population of potential clients while other members exit the caseload. Population-based forecasting, as reported here, is really quite a novel approach to forecasting public assistance caseloads. In most situations, simple extrapolations of past trends or econometric time-series models are used. Characteristics associated with entries and exits can be used to develop dynamic models of current and future caseload changes. For budgeting purposes, these models can be readily translated into average annual caseload levels and can be directly used to examine policy alternatives and programmatic options. Entry and exit rates and volumes can be related to historical, current, and anticipated changes in economic, social, and programmatic conditions to develop models of caseload behavior, and ultimately, forecasts of caseload levels that are used for budget development.     

German Sociologists are Looking for the ``Good Society'

The ``Good Society' was in the center of interest of the recentGerman Sociological Congress. The question for the goodness ofsocieties included defining and measuring quality of life andthe construction of social indicators. The feasibility of a goodsociety turns out to be a very complicate question but we can notavoid to strive for it.     

Different Predictors of Quality of Life in Urban Environment

The present study aimed at comparing the effects of different sets of predictors on quality of life in an urban environment. We used secondary data collected by means of a self-report questionnaire on a sample of 343 residents of a big Italian city. The questionnaire included a multidimensional scale elaborated by the World Health Organization (WHOQoL brief scale) assessing quality of life in terms of four different evaluations concerning distinct aspects of life: physical health; psychological status; social relationships; environment. Four different types of predictors were considered: (1) socio-demographic characteristics; (2) quality of social relations (perceived social support); (3) place attachment; (4) healthy lifestyle. To test the influence of different groups of predictors on the dimensions of WHOQoL we performed four hierarchical regression analyses. Several significant influences were found. In particular the results pointed out the great role of perceived social support and place attachment in promoting quality of life. That result suggests the importance of community interventions in urban environment.     

老年人口生活质量与社会支持的关系研究

国外不少研究表明社会支持(social support)与老年人的生活质量状态有着较强的相关性。本文基于2002年的中国健康长寿调查数据,在考虑人口社会特征和身体健康变量的情况下,应用Stereotype Ordinal Logit模型,从不同的维度分析考察了社会支持对中国老年人口生活质量的影响。结果表明,社会支持对老年人口生活质量的不同方面都有着积极的影响,而不同来源的社会支持对老年人生活质量产生不同程度的影响。     

Validity and Reliability of Subjective Social Indicators: The effect of different measures of association

In an international research project, a meta analysis of multitrait-multimethod matrices was used to evaluate the effects of characteristics of survey measurement instruments on the quality of survey data. The analyses in this project were done on the basis of polychoric/polyserial correlations. The result of such a study can be used to correct for measurement errors if the correlation in the substantive study is also a polychoric/polyserial correlation. It is, however, doubtful if these quality estimates of survey measurement instruments are appropriate for studies based on the most frequently used Pearson correlations. In this paper, the general approach will be discussed first. After that, the results with respect to validity and reliability estimates, obtained using two different measures of association, will be compared: the polychoric/polyserial correlations and the Pearson correlations. This study suggests that the differences between estimates of the reliability for scales with different numbers of categories are quite large, while all other effects remain approximately the same. The reasons for the differences will also be given. All the results are based on experiments containing questions with respect to satisfaction with life and aspects of life. Thus the study provides estimates of validity and reliability on measures of satisfaction with life and aspects of life which can be used in practice for the prediction and optimization of data quality and for correction of the data with regard to measurement error.     

The Development of Official Social Statistics in Italy with a Life Quality Approach

The article covers the main steps of official statistics in the second half of the Nineties through the illustration of the transition from economic oriented official statistics to the quality of life approach. The system of the Multipurpose Surveys introduced in 1993 to give an answer to questions at social level and to provide indicators for social policies, has been developed with a quality of life approach that combines the objective dimension to the subjective one. All dimensions of the social sphere have been analyzed with this approach: health, crime, leisure, work, poverty and deprivation. Sometimes the subjective questions were proxy of the objective situation, such as health and sometimes subjective aspects complemented the objective as in the case of crime and poverty. The history of the Italian official statistics is an example of how it is possible to realize a qualitative leap in social statistics integrating the objective and the subjective dimension.