Is subjective well-being a predictor of nonresponse in broad population surveys?

In connection with a medical screening operation for hypertension and diabetes among all adults (20+) in a medium-sized Norwegian county, all screenees were required to fill in a questionnaire containing questions about subjective well-being (overall life satisfaction and self-assessed health). Since screenees in practice constituted a captive audience, questionnaire data are available for an unusually large proportion (88%) of the eligible population (N=71 896). Information about socioeconomic background could be obtained for all screenees through record-linking. A second questionnaire was handed to all screenees as they left the screening site. The response rate (by mail) for this second questionnaire was quite normal, appr. 80%. Working on the assumption that nonresponders and/or late responders for the second questionnaire are representative of persons not responding in ordinary broad population surveys, nonresponse biases in the means, variances and covariances of our measures (in the first questionnaire and the outside records) could be investigated. Bivariate results showed a slight overrepresentation of screenees with poor self-assessed health among those who returned the second questionnaire promptly by mail. However, multivariate analyses controlling for the age composition of person with less favorable self-assessed health reversed this pattern completely so that the onlydirect effect from subjective well-being remaining is a very slight tendency for persons in poor self-assessed health to fail to cooperate.Paper presented at the XII World Congress of Sociology, Madrid, July 8–13, 1990.Data for this study has been collected under the auspices of the Norwegian Head of National Health Screening Service. The research reported herein has been financed by the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities.     

A typology of lifestyles

Lifestyle, currently a popular lay term but not an important construct within the social sciences, is examined briefly. Two studies designed to explore a lifestyle typology using personal projects methodology are reported. In the first study, three distinct lifestyle types were identified among a large community sample. They were tentatively labelled pressured, relaxed, and wishful thinking lifestyles. In the second stuty, these types were replicated for a university student group, with two types of a relaxed lifestyle being revealed.Four lifestyle types were found among those in the university sample reporting high subjective well-being. They were tentatively labelled hedonistic, adventuristic, individualistic, and promethean. A preliminary analysis of a variety of demographic and socioeconomic variables using the four types for the subsample reporting high well-being revealed age and sex differences. Young respondents tended to be assigned to the hedonistic and adventuristic types, while older respondents tended to be assigned to the promethean type. Women tended to be assigned to hedonistic type. The results and some implications for further research are discussed.     

Fertility of rural China: effects of local family planning and health programs

The rationing of births in China after the 1979 announcement of the one-child family policy has been held responsible for the rapid decrease in Chinese fertility, whereas other observers have noted that parallel fertility declines occurred with voluntary behavior in other East and Southeast Asian countries. This paper assesses the joint contribution of local family planning and health programs, individual characteristics of women, and the development of their communities, as explanatory variables for Chinese fertility in rural areas of three provinces in 1985. Given the explicit quantitative reproductive goals of the government, an ordered Probit model for cumulative fertility is estimated for women age 15–34 and 35–49.The authors appreciate the comments on and corrections of our paper by John Ermisch and the programming assistance of Paul McGuire. The financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation is acknowledged.     

Macro-effects of changes in household preferences for children

The basic ideas underlying the analysis in this paper are that family size can be viewed as an economic life cycle decision and that there are decision trade-offs among fertility, consumption, and leisure. A micromodel of life cycle choice is developed and embedded in an economic-demographic macromodel. The macromodel is then used in a series of computer experiments to assess the effects on the population and the economy of changes in household preferences for children. The experiments include factual and counterfactual simulations of Canadian historical demographic experience and simulations of alternative future scenarios. The analysis and conclusions have general relevance for countries that have been through a fertility boom-and-bust sequence.We are grateful for the support received from Health and Welfare Canada's Review of Demography and Its Implications for Social and Economic Policy and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are grateful also to Christine H. Feaver, who carried out the computer-related aspects of the work on which this paper is based.     

Attitudes toward items of time budgets as predictors of time uses: The case of men-v-women

This study explores the impact of attitudes that men-v-women hold toward work and leisure activities on time spent on these activities in order to determine whether which sex shows a higher level of relationship. An empirical data survey using mail questionnaires was undertaken in Montréal and in Toronto with five socio-economic strata. Results show that women's attitudes are better predictors of time spent on leisure than men's attitudes, that women's time spent at work and home chore is higher than men's counterpart and that gender explain significantly more variance in time spent at work and on leisure than attitudes. In order to assess the sole effects of gender, the variance attributable to other socio-demographic variables (age, culture, education, profession and income) was cancelled through regressions on these variables and further statistics of the residuals of these regressions. It is concluded that the deterministic view that exogenous variables explain time budgets is more adequate than the voluntaristic views; that women work more and attribute more value to leisure than men.     

“Consumer Confidence” Indexes as social indicators

Consumer Confidence Indexes can be sensibly used in economic and social research conducted in theoretical and methodological framework of social indicators research. They are good predictors of other attitudes, such as voting preferences. Voting preferences are determined much more strongly by expectations of changes in economic conditions than by evaluations of present situation. On the other hand, Consumer Sentiment Indexes — irrespective whether they concern future or present times — are correlated more strongly with leading than with coincident indexes of economic cycles. That proves very important role of predictions, expectations and hopes in attitude formation.     

A crime based analysis and classification of 729 American cities

Thirty social indicators, consisting of crime rates and variables which may be regarded theoretically as correlates of crime, are factor analyzed for 729 incorporated American cities with a minimum population of 25000. Factors associated with crime, poverty, native-born status, city revenue, residential stability, home construction, city size, and population age are identified. The data matrix is partitioned in order to identify high crime and low crime cities. The cities in each category are then subjected to cluster analysis on the basis of the seven socioeconomic factors, and the resulting groups are investigated further in order to identify distinctive clusters and underlying patterns of social conditions. A group of model low crime communities is identified — virtually all were incorporated white noose suburbs of metropolitan areas. Residential instability and large population size are associated with two of the high crime groups, which include stereotypical crime problem cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Kansas City. The member cities constituting each of the eight groups are documented, and the policy implications of the findings are discussed.     

Client satisfaction with developmental disabilities services

Data from a representative sample of 312 developmentally disabled clients of Florida's Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services are analyzed to discover the characteristics of the clients and to determine the extent to which the clients are satisfied with various services, reasons for any dissatisfaction that exists, and the factors which are related to satisfaction with services. Clients are least likely to be satisfied with the caregiver support services and the vocational and rehabilitative services they receive. Across all categories, reasons most often given for dissatisfaction with services are inappropriateness and insufficient amount. The factors most strongly related to client satisfaction with services are age, living arrangements, and number of services received. Adolescents are less likely than persons at other ages to be satisfied with the services they receive, persons living in a family setting are less likely than persons in nonfamily settings to be satisfied with services, and the greater the number of services received the lower the likelihood of client satisfaction. Combined with information showing that most of the clients have multiple disabilities, these data suggest that the service delivery system does a better job of delivering some services than others. A slot oriented program such as that in Florida may pay insufficient attention to the existence of multiple needs among persons who are developmentally disabled and to providing services to the networks which form the client's economic and social support system.     

Do Demographic Characteristics Make a Difference to Burnout among Hong Kong Secondary School Teachers?

This study aims to investigate the relationship between teachers demographic variables and burnout in Hong Kong using the Maslach Burnout Inventory. It is found that when compared with the North American normative data, Hong Kong teachers scored in the average range of burnout in emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment while they scored in the low range of burnout in depersonalization. Gender differences were found in all three burnout syndromes, and teachers who were younger, unmarried, without religious beliefs, less experienced, without finishing professional training and of junior rank were more consistently burned out. Whereas age was the strongest predictor for emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, teachers rank is the best predictor for personal accomplishment. However, the effect of demographic characteristics of teachers on burnout is not that salient.     

Demographic change,attendance area adjustment and school system impacts

In the extensive litigation over school board liability for segregated schools, a great deal of attention has been focused on changes in school attendance areas. Evidence presented in several trials suggested that school boards have gerrymandered boundaries to keep some schools black and others white. Even though both district and appeal courts have found violations in attendance zone changes, there has been little other than anecodotal evidence to support these findings. In many cases the areas with the most changes in attendance boundaries are also the areas of rapid racial transition, but correlation does not necessarily mean causation. This case study examines boundary changes in Topeka and suggests that racial change in schools is more directly attributable to demographic shifts than to attendance boundary changes.     

Long and short term poverty: Is Germany a two-thirds society?

Social scientists and media commentators have expressed concern that Western countries are becoming two-thirds societies in which two-thirds enjoy the benefits of affluence, while one-third are locked into poverty or near-poverty. This paper, based on economic panel data, tests the two-thirds society hypothesis in the case of (West) Germany 1984–89. The main finding is that poverty (defined as receiving less than half of average household income) is mostly short term and that nothing like one-third are locked into poverty. On the other hand, far more people than had previously been thought are at risk of poverty. In 1984–89 only 3% were poor every year but about 25% were poor in at least one year. Germany appears to be a 75-15-10 society: 75% not poor, 15% occasionally poor but with generally adequate incomes, and 10% frequently poor or near-poor with incomes that may be considered inadequate. Analysis is based on the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and relates to the 8,000 people who were interviewed each year from 1984 to 1989.     

Test of a field theory of consciousness and social change: Time series analysis of participation in the TM-Sidhi program and reduction of violent death in the U.S.

This study is part of a research program to test the hypothesis that consciousness has a fundamental field property that is relevant to social change in the direction of improved quality of life. The exogenous variable was the number of participants in the group practice of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) and TM-Sidhi program, a technology of consciousness predicted to reduce stress in society through a field of pure consciousness. The period of the study was 1982–1985, during which the size of a group of participants in Iowa was sufficient to have a measurable influence on the U.S. much of the time, according to theory; a secondary analysis also considered the period 1979–1985, including the time when the group of participants was smaller. The endogenous variable was a violence index comprising the number of weekly fatalities in the U.S. due to three major causes of violent death: motor vehicle fatalities, suicide, and homicide. Time series analysis using both the intervention analysis approach and the transfer function approach indicated a significant reduction in the violence index associated with the exogenous variable. Alternative hypotheses are discussed, as are the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for understanding social change and improving the quality of life.     

Change in the stressfulness of life in American states and regions from 1976 to 1982

The State Stress Index (SSI) described in this paper^I measures difference between the states of the United States, and differences over time, in the occurrence of stressful life events. The method of constructing the SSI is described and the scores for each of the American states in 1976 and 1982 are presented. There are large differences between the states in the stressfulness of life. The construct validity of the SSI was supported by analysis which show that the higher the SSI, the higher the incidence of behaviors that have long been assumed to be affected by stress, such as violence and heavy smoking and drinking, and suicide. Scores on the SSI revealed an increase in the stressfulness of life between 1976 and 1982, largely due to the economic recession in 1982. Despite this the 1982 rank order of the states was essentially the same as their relative position in 1976. The West remained the most stressful region of the United States, despite its other attractions, and the North Central and North East remained the least stressful regions, despite their rustbelt and frostbelt images.     

Equity,efficiency, and identity: Grounding the debate over population and sustainability

If social scientists are to provide a more useful contribution to international debates over population and environment, we must find ways to combine the insights of our competing theoretical traditions. Political economy, rational choice, and cultural institutionalist perspectives are each associated with a different assessment and characterization of the population problem, as well as divergent strategies of response, prioritizing in turn the goals of equity, efficiency, and cultural identity. The principal argument of this paper is that these three perspectives, and the goals which they embody, are like the three legs of a stool; none is sufficient and each is necessary to uphold socially acceptable responses to population growth in the context of broader challenges of sustainability. Each perspective is reviewed in turn, distinguishing narrow and polarizing applications that trivialize the way social and economic systems rely on the natural environment from applications that are useful in fashioning a more integrated approach. The paper concludes with reflections on how this approach may support and enrich a focus on sustainable livelihoods in development planning.     

Do some authoritarian governments foster physical quality of life?

A recent claim that the populations of populist authoritarian governments have relatively high physical quality of life is tested empirically and found to be true. Analysis of life expectancy in 103 countries shows that although political rights contribute to the prediction of life expectancy, net of GNP per capita, one category of authoritarian governments, here called the constrained authoritarians, has higher than expected physical quality of life. Of interest is the additional finding that location in sub-Saharan Africa has a strong negative impact on life expectancy, net of GNP and political rights.I appreciate the contributions to this paper of Linda Bush, Rebecca Miles Doan, Eugene Erickson, Joe Francis, Donald Freebairn, Victor Nee and Linda Jacobsen.     

Beyond IPAT and Kuznets Curves: Globalization as a Vital Factor in Analysing the Environmental Impact of Socio-Economic Metabolism

We bring the rapidly developing tools for analyzing society's metabolism to the attention of a scientific audience concerned with matters of population and, in a complementary fashion, we draw the attention of material and energy flow analysts to the role of population and population dynamics within their own paradigm. As an analytic framework, we use the classic IPAT-model that relates environmental impact (I), population (P), affluence (A), and technology (T). We relate the IPAT model to the tool commonly used in MFA, so-called environmental Kuznets curves, and re-analyze empirical data from various sources, for both affluent industrial and for developing countries, within these frameworks. We conclude that population and technology seem to dominate over affluence as far as environmental impact is concerned, but that both the IPAT and Kuznets models fail to take into account the intricate interdependencies among different socio-economic systems and the increases in their the economic, material and population exchanges. In effect, both models tend to underestimate the environmental impact and create too optimistic an image of dematerialization in affluent industrial countries.     

Population in context: A typology of environmental driving forces

This paper presents a typology and qualitative model of causation for use in assessing the relative contributions of population growth to problems of pollution, lost biodiversity, and natural resource depletion. Population growth is placed in context as one of eight key driving forces that shape environmental quality today. It is treated primarily as an impact amplifier, along with technology. Root causes are traced to paradigmatic beliefs—especially anthropocentrism and contempocentrism—which find expression in unsustainable consumption patterns and designs of political economy.     

Immigration and internal migration “flight”: A California case study

Recent analyses of 1990 census migration data have pointed up disparities in the way immigration and internal migration contributions affect an area's demographic profile. They show that there is little overlap between states with large population gains from internal migration from other parts of the United States and states with large population gains from immigration from abroad. This emerging pattern, along with the fact that immigration and internal migration select on very different demographic characteristics, could lead toward a demographic balkanization of the nation's population. This paper evaluates immigration-induced out-movement from California, based on an analysis of recently released migration data from the 1990 U.S. census. The results presented here suggest that California's out-migration consists of two different migration systems: first, an immigration-induced flight that exports lower income and less-educated Californians, primarily, to the nearby states of Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona. And second, a more conventional migration exchange with the rest of the United States that involves the redistribution of better educated, higher income migrants. It is the former migration system which appears to be most responsive to the low-skilled immigration flows, while the latter should be responsive to more conventional labor market employment characteristics. This implies that, irrespective of changing economic conditions in the state, the continued immigration of low-skilled migrants will lead to more losses of native-born internal migrants to neighboring states and metropolitan areas. However, these migrant streams will not be made up of the best and brightest residents that characterize most conventional migration streams.A longer version of this report with more extensive background statistics isResearch Report 94–306 (Frey, 1994b) available from Publications, Population Studies Center, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48104.     

Households and Territory. The Location of the Population of Rome in Relation to Housing Supply Characteristics

This study forms part of a general programme of research aimed at evaluating the quality of life in Rome. In particular, we have wished to analyse the way in which housing quality, measured with indicators of housing structure and utilization, intersects with the quality of urban livability, measured here only with indicators of social background, homogeneity and hardship referring to subjects living in the individual segments of the city. Groups of territorial areas, homogeneous by housing typology, were identified using multivariate data analysis and it was thus shown how particular typologies of household respond to this supply. From this emerged a particular model of development of the city in concentric bands, within which the originally differentiated households have tended over time to assume homogeneous characteristics.     

Exponential Population Growth and Doubling Times: Are They Dead or Merely Quiescent?

Exponential Growth and Doubling Times: Use of these popular population buzzwords of the last half of the twentieth century was fully justified by the growth rates of that period. However, those growth rates have now all but disappeared and so have the underlying reasons that those buzzwords made sense. Misuse of such expressions today costs credibility. Though the world's population growth certainly does remain vigorous and robust, creating many reasons for concern, nowhere today is growth projected as exponential. The essence of exponential growth is analyzed and distinguished from exponential curves, and non-exponential growth. Several types of current population growth are recognized, none being exponential. In periods of non-exponential growth, a Doubling Time calculated from a single annual growth rate is grossly erroneous and often absurd. Other standard measures of growth are needed. United Nations projections should include figures for percentage growth by 2025 and 2050.