Do Measured and Unmeasured Family Factors Bias the Association Between Education and Self-Assessed Health?

The association between educational attainment and self-assessed health is well established but the mechanisms that explain this association are not fully understood yet. It is likely that part of the association is spurious because (genetic and non-genetic) characteristics of a person’s family of origin simultaneously affect one’s educational attainment and one’s adult health. In order to obtain an unbiased estimate of the association between education and health, we have to control for all relevant family factors. In practice, however, it is impossible to measure all relevant family factors. Sibling models are particularly appropriate in this case, because they control for the total impact of family factors, even if not all relevant aspects can be measured. I use data on siblings from a US study (MIDUS) and Dutch study (NKPS) to assess the total family impact on self-assessed health and, more importantly, to assess whether there is a family bias in the association between educational attainment and self-assessed health. The results suggest that there is a substantial family effect; about 20% of the variation in self-assessed health between siblings can be ascribed to (measured and unmeasured) family factors. Measured family factors, such as parental education and father’s occupation, could account only for a small part of the family effect. Furthermore, the results imply that it is unlikely that there is substantial bias due to family effects in the association between education and self-assessed health. This strengthens the conclusions from prior studies on the association between education and self-assessed health.     

Economic Migration and Happiness: Comparing Immigrants’ and Natives’ Happiness Gains From Income

Research on happiness casts doubt on the notion that increases in income generally bring greater happiness. This finding can be taken to imply that economic migration might fail to result in increased happiness for the migrants: migration as a means of increasing one’s income might be no more effective in raising happiness than other means of increasing one’s income. This implication is counterintuitive: it suggests that migrants are mistaken in believing that economic migration is a path to improving one’s well-being, at least to the extent that well-being means (or includes) happiness. This paper considers a scenario in which it is less likely that migrants are simply mistaken in this regard. The finding that increased incomes do not lead to greater happiness is an average (non)effect—and migrants might be exceptional in this regard, gaining happiness from increased incomes to a greater extent than most people. The analysis here, using data from the World Values Survey, finds that the association between income and happiness is indeed stronger for immigrants in the USA than for natives—but even for immigrants that association is still relatively weak. The discussion then considers this finding in light of the fact that immigrants also report lower levels of happiness than natives after controlling for other variables.     

The changing relationship between family size and educational attainment over the course of socioeconomic development: Evidence from Indonesia

Many studies from developed countries show a negative correlation between family size and children’s schooling, while results from developing countries show this association ranging from positive to neutral to negative, depending on the context. The body of evidence suggests that this relationship changes as a society develops, but this theory has been difficult to assess because the existing evidence requires comparisons across countries with different social structures and at different levels of development. The world’s fourth most populous nation in 2007, Indonesia has developed rapidly in recent decades. This context provides the opportunity to study these relationships within the same rapidly developing setting to see if and how these associations change. Results show that in urban areas, the association between family size and children’s schooling was positive for older cohorts but negative for more recent cohorts. Models using instrumental variables to address the potential endogeneity of fertility con rm these results. In contrast, rural areas show no significant association between family size and children’s schooling for any cohort. These findings show how the relationship between family size and children’s schooling can differ within the same country and change over time as contextual factors evolve with socioeconomic development.     

Concepts of Chinese folk happiness

Discourses on Chinese folk happiness are often based on anecdotal narratives or qualitative analysis. Two traditional concepts of happiness popular in Chinese culture are introduced. The paper constructs a concept of Chinese folk happiness on basis of the findings of a scientific survey on the Taiwanese people regarding their concepts of well-being at nation and personal levels. The survey has revealed that people’s concepts of well-being are consisted of a diversity of elements including political, economic, social, and cultural factors, as well as health, family, job, and social relationships. The paper compares these concepts with the traditional notions of Chinese folk happiness.     

How Social Relations and Structures can Produce Happiness and Unhappiness: An International Comparative Analysis

In this paper, subjective well being, as measured by survey questions on happiness and life satisfaction, is investigated from a sociological-comparative point of view. The central thesis is that happiness and satisfaction must be understood as the outcome of an interaction process between individual characteristics and aspirations on the one side, and social relations and macrosocial structures on the other side. A distinction is made between life satisfaction and happiness; the former is more seen as the outcome of an evaluation process including material and social aspirations and achievements, the latter as an outcome of positive experiences, particularly close personal relationships. The focus of this paper is on micro- and macrosocial conditions favouring or inhibiting the emergence of happiness and satisfaction. It is hypothesized that dense and good basic social relations, occupational involvement and success, sociocultural (religious and altruistic) orientations and participation are conducive to happiness and life satisfaction; the same should be true at the macrolevel for economic prosperity, relatively equal social structures, a well-established welfare state and political democracy. The latter conditions, however, should be more important for life satisfaction than for happiness. A comparative, multilevel regression analysis of happiness in 41 nations around the world is carried out (using the World Value Survey 1995–1997). Both our general assumption and most of the specific hypotheses could be confirmed. It turned very clearly that “happiness” and “life satisfaction” are two different concepts. It could be shown that microsocial embedding and sociocultural integration of a person are highly relevant for happiness. However, contrary to earlier studies, we find that macrosocial factors like the economic wealth of nation, the distribution of income, the extent of the welfare state and political freedom are also relevant, particularly for satisfaction. What counts most is the ability to cope with life, including subjective health and financial satisfaction, close social relations, and the economic perspectives for improvement in the future, both at the level of the individual and at that of the society. These abilities are certainly improved by favourable macrosocial conditions and institutions, such as a more equal income distribution, political democracy and a welfare state.     

Does Individual Secularism Promote Life Satisfaction? The Moderating Role of Societal Development

This study was designed to examine the link between values and life satisfaction, examining the role of culture in this process. Secularism was found to predict life satisfaction scores at a small but statistically very significant level in persons from all nations participating in all four waves of the World Values Survey. The direction and strength of this relationship was moderated, however, by the country’s human development index—people in low-HDI countries consistently showed a negative relationship between secularism and happiness across the four waves of the WVS; people in high-HDI countries initially showed a negative relationship between secularism and happiness in Waves 1 and 2, but a positive relationship between secularism and happiness in Waves 3 and 4. These results thus appear to support a “cultural fit” hypothesis consistently for persons in low HDI countries, and a transition towards a “cultural fit” for persons in HDI countries as data was collected across the four waves. By Wave 4, it is clear that citizens who endorse values consistent with their county’s developmental trajectory are more satisfied with their lives. This study demonstrates the amenability of the data collected by the World Values Survey to individual-level analysis of psychological process that is responsive to the shaping influence of variations in their nation’s societal characteristics.     

Happiness and altruism within the extended family

We propose a direct measure of altruism between parents and adult children, using survey data on happiness from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 2000–2004. The question of altruism within families has policy relevance, for example, to understand whether public transfers crowd out private ones. Previous empirical evidence, based on observed transfer behavior, has failed to establish a clear consensus. Using various cross section, panel data, and instrumental variable estimators, we find a robust association between the happiness of parents and that of their adult children. A 1 standard deviation increase in a child’s happiness is associated with the same increase in own happiness as that of a 20–45% increase in household income, depending on specification.     

Mothers’ Marital Status and Type of Delivery Medical Care in Guatemala

The use of modern medical care for child delivery in rural Guatemala is low relative to other Latin American countries. In the previous literature, factors such as a woman’s age, education, ethnicity, religious affiliation and income are found to be important determinants of the type of delivery medical care she receives. This study hypothesizes that a woman’s marital status influences her decision as well. Using a binomial logit framework, the study finds that unmarried women are more likely to see a modern medical provider in delivery than married women, even after controlling for demographic, socioeconomic, and husbands’ characteristics. Therefore, unmarried women seem to make more informed decisions in terms of their attitudes in childbearing and maternal health relative to their married counterparts. As a result, both economic as well as social developments seem necessary to induce changes in the high incidence of maternal mortality and morbidity in Guatemala.     

Income and Happiness in Time of Post-Communist Modernization

This paper discusses the relations between economic development, family income, and happiness in post-communist Poland from the point of view of Inglehart’s theory of modernization. The happiness is understood as satisfaction with income and life, and as psychological well-being. The analysis of survey data yields the conclusion that economic development reduces the strength of the relations between income and satisfaction as well as between income and psychological well-being. These findings may be explained by changes in the value system from collectivist/materialist to individualist/post-materialist, even when these values are not directly measured. The analyzed data are from a series of representative surveys conducted in Poland during a period of political and economic transformation (i.e., between 1989 and 2008). Official statistical data on Polish economic development during the same period are used as a background for survey results. The relations between income and happiness change in Poland in a way consistent with Inglehart’s modernization theory.     

Combining Happines’s and Suffering in a Retrospective View of Anchor Periods in Life: A Differential Approach to Subjective Well-Being

The intersection of dimensions of subjective well-being (SWB) generates SWB types. We delineated SWB types by cross-tabulating happiness and suffering ratings that participants attributed to outstandingly meaningful periods in their life referred to as anchor periods. A sample of 499 older Israelis (age 58–94) was queried about two positive periods (the happiest, the most important) and two negative periods (the most miserable, the most difficult). A variety of variables discriminated between the more frequent congruous types of Happy (high happiness and low suffering) and Unhappy (low happiness and high suffering), but also presented the incongruous types of Inflated (high happiness and high suffering) and Deflated (low happiness and low suffering) as discriminable. Thus, women were more likely to be Inflated whereas men were more likely to be Deflated; low education related more to Happy in the happiest period and to Unhappy in the negative periods; present life satisfaction related more to Happy than to Unhappy in the positive, but not in the negative, periods; and Holocaust survivors were more likely to be Deflated and Unhappy in the negative, but not in the positive, periods. The study supported a differential perspective on SWB within people’s narratives of their lives. An erratum to this article is available at .     

A global perspective on happiness and fertility

The literature on fertility and happiness has neglected comparative analysis. We investigate the fertility/happiness association using data from the world values surveys for 86 countries. We find that, globally, happiness decreases with the number of children. This association, however, is strongly modified by individual and contextual factors. Most importantly, we find that the association between happiness and fertility evolves from negative to neutral to positive above age 40, and is strongest among those who are likely to benefit most from upward intergenerational transfers. In addition, analyses by welfare regime show that the negative fertility/ happiness association for younger adults is weakest in countries with high public support for families, and the positive association above age 40 is strongest in countries where old-age support depends mostly on the family. Overall these results suggest that children are a long-term investment in well-being, and highlight the importance of the life-cycle stage and contextual factors in explaining the happiness/fertility association.     

The Subjective Well-being Construct: A Test of its Convergent,Discriminant, and Factorial Validity

Using structural equation modeling, we found empirical support for the prevailing theory that subjective well-being consists of three domains: (1) cognitive evaluations of one’s life (i.e., life satisfaction or happiness); (2) positive affect; and (3) negative affect. Multiple indicators of satisfaction/happiness were shown to have strong convergent validity as well as discriminant validity from positive and negative affect. Positive and negative affect likewise exhibited discriminant validity from one another. At both the item and scale levels of analysis, we obtained an intercorrelated three-factor solution corresponding to the three proposed subjective well-being domains.     

Do Siblings’ Fertility Decisions Influence Each Other?

Individuals’ fertility decisions are shaped not only by their own characteristics and life course paths but also by social interaction with others. However, in practice, it is difficult to disentangle the role of social interaction from other factors, such as individual and family background variables. We measure social interaction through the cross-sibling influences on fertility. Continuous-time hazard models are estimated separately for women’s first and second births. In addition to individual socioeconomic variables, demographic variables, and an unobserved factor specific to each sibling pair, siblings’ birth events and their timing enter as time-varying covariates. We use data from longitudinal population-wide Norwegian administrative registers. The data cover more than 110,000 sibling pairs and include the siblings’ fertility, education, income, and marital histories. Our results indicate that cross-sibling influences are relatively strong for the respondents’ first births but weak for the second parity transition.     

Relative Income and Happiness in Asia: Evidence from Nationwide Surveys in China, Japan, and Korea

This study attempts to examine relative income effects on perceived happiness in three major Asian countries—China, Japan, and Korea—in comparison with the United Sates, on the basis of largely comparable nationwide surveys in these countries. Consistent with the results from previous studies in Western countries, comparisons with an individual’s own income and average income of the reference group are significantly associated with the individual’s perceived happiness in Asia. The associations between relative income and happiness are stronger for individual income than family income in China, while the opposite is true in Japan and Korea. Even after controlling for the subjective assessment of family income or personal class identification within the society as a whole, income comparisons within the reference group matter for assessing happiness, especially when using family income for comparisons. Moreover, relative deprivation within the reference group, which is measured by the Yitzhaki index, is negatively related to happiness, providing more evidence for the validity of the relative income hypothesis.     

Assessing the Use of the Family Affluence Scale as Socioeconomic Indicators for Researching Health Inequalities in Taiwan Adolescents

This study examined the reliability and validity of the Family Affluence Scale (FAS) and explored the relationship between FAS and health in a general adolescent population of Taiwan. Our data was obtained from a 2009 school-based survey. In total, 3,368 students (1,741 boys, 1,627 girls) in grades 6–10 in Kinmen County, Taiwan completed a modified WHO Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) questionnaire. Indicators of the family’s social position were their parents’ occupation and education. Indicators of material affluence were number of cars, number of holiday travel, whether the participant had his or her own room and number of computers (FAS items). A higher proportion of the participants completed the four family affluence items than their parents’ occupation and education items (≧98% vs. 90% and 88%; respectively). Analysis of the FAS showed a moderate internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.35). The associations between the FAS scores and parental occupation and education were moderate (P < .001). Consistent gradients were found for the association between FAS and positive health and health promoting behaviours. In conclusion, the Taiwan version of the FAS had a high completion rate and moderate internal reliability and external validity. The clear associations between the FAS and health indicators confirm the findings of previous studies and suggest that the FAS can be used as an additional measure of socioeconomic status among Taiwan adolescents.     

Income Inequality and its Consequences for Life Satisfaction: What Role do Social Cognitions Play?

While it is generally agreed that income inequality affects an individual’s well-being, researchers disagree on whether people living in areas of high income disparity report more or less happiness than those in more equal environments, thereby indicating the need to study how and why income inequality matters to the individual’s well-being. Findings on group-specific reaction patterns to income inequality further fuel this need. Alesina et al. (2004) argue that a preference for inequality and the perception of the possibility of social mobility account for the indistinct relationship between income inequality and subjective well-being. Combining this hypothesis with previous research on social cognition and drawing on social justice theory, this paper aims to demonstrate the mediating nature of perceptions of income inequality. It argues that the perceived legitimacy of distributive outcomes and procedures contributes to how income inequalities affect individuals and their sense of well-being. The empirical analysis is based on data from the International Social Justice Project, developed from face-to-face interviews with a representative sample of the German population. Using structural equation modeling, the paper finds structural biases in the perception of income inequality. The paper concludes that subjective well-being is a product of the individual’s perception and legitimating processes. The results indicate that social cognition is a useful tool for studies of income inequality and subjective well-being.     

Multidimensionl Poverty and The Role of Social Capital in Poverty Alleviation Among Ethnic Groups in Rural Vietnam: A Multilevel Analysis

This paper empirically examines the disparities over time across six dimensions of poverty (monetary, education, health, housing, basic services, and durable assets) between ethnic minority and majority households in rural Vietnam. Using the five-wave panel data of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) 2008–2016, we observe improvements in most non-monetary dimensions of poverty for both ethnic groups, while the monetary dimension shows the highest degrees of deprivation and the lowest rate of decrease during the studied period. Health is the only dimension in which ethnic minority households are not only better off than those of majority households during the studied period, but also report improvement. We further explore the role of social capital in ethnic minorities and non-minorities at household and community levels in multiple dimensions of poverty by employing multilevel models. Our study reports the significant effects social capital have at the community level on reducing poverty in the monetary, education, housing, and basic services dimensions for ethnic minorities, while social capital at the household level shows significant effects on monetary, basic services, and durable assets. These findings indicate that policy makers ought to consider the role of social capital when designing poverty alleviation strategies for the country.

     

Relative Income,Relative Assets,and Happiness in Urban China

Does more money always mean that people are happier with their lives? To test the social comparison hypothesis as applied to happiness, this study uses survey data from the 2002 Chinese Household Income Project to examine the association between household economic resources and happiness in urban China. Household economic resources are measured as both income and assets (e.g., net worth and net worth minus home equity). In addition, the analyses include measures of relative income and relative assets. Results of ordinary least square regression analysis show a positive association of absolute income with the happiness score whereas relative income is negatively associated with happiness. Although household assets are a significant and positive predictor of self-assessments of happiness, measures of relative household assets do not correlate with happiness. Study findings suggest the level of happiness among urban populations could be increased through policies that promote pro-poor growth and equal distribution of economic resources. In addition, introducing asset-building policies as supplements to other social assistance programs may promote happiness.     

Validity and Psychometric Properties of the Early Development Instrument in Canada,Australia, United States,and Jamaica

There is an increasing support from international organizations and the research community for stepping beyond infant or child mortality as the most common child level social indicator and progressing towards an international measure of child development. The Early Development Instrument (EDI) is a teacher-completed measure of children’s developmental health at school entry, which to date has been used in more than a dozen countries. The EDI includes five developmental domains (Physical Health and Well-being, Social Competence, Emotional Maturity, Language and Cognitive Development and Communication Skills and General Knowledge) and 16 subdomains. This paper examines the EDI’s psychometric properties in four English-speaking countries (Canada, Australia, United States and Jamaica) by evaluating both the internal consistency and factor structures, as well as exploring the association between the EDI’s Language and Cognitive Development Domain and a direct assessment of children’s receptive vocabulary (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, PPVT). Overall, the factor loadings and internal consistencies of domains and subdomains were similar across the countries. The comparisons of the Language and Cognitive Development Domain with the PPVT showed high specificity and low sensitivity. The results of this paper indicate that the EDI, a measure of children’s developmental status at school entry, demonstrates similar psychometric properties in a number of countries, thus building the evidence for the instrument to be added to the limited array of internationally comparable child social indicators.     

Retrospective and prospective evaluations of environmental quality under urban renewal as determinants of residents’ subjective quality of life

Claims about the impacts of environmental quality associated with urban renewal on the resident’s subjective quality of life are more speculative than empirically grounded. To clarify the impacts of environmental quality under urban renewal, this study surveyed 876 residents living in housing surrounding seven urban renewal sites in Hong Kong. It shows that environmental quality, both perceived (retrospectively) during and expected (prospectively) after urban renewal, exhibited positive effects on the resident’s subjective quality of life. Furthermore, it reveals that the subjective quality of life of the resident with higher education was less responsive to environmental quality perceived during urban renewal. The findings imply that more measures to mitigate the adverse social impact of urban renewal are preferably available to residents with less education.