Indicators and Indices of Child Well-being: A Brief American History

This paper traces the history of indicators and indices of child well-being from its origins in the social indicator movement of the 1970s through recent developments in the field. Initial work calling for comprehensive sets of indicators of child well-being and later recommendations for indicator improvement are detailed. Products that resulted from these recommendations, such as comprehensive indicator reports and online resources are described. The development of child well-being indices is shown to parallel the history of indicators. The contributions of state and international indicator and index projects are included as well. Important aspects of child well-being indicator development are uncovered through documenting its history, including the need to focus on subjective as well as objective measures of well-being, and the need to develop indicators for the multiple ecological contexts of children’s lives, but to separate measures of context from measures of child outcomes. A rough consensus emerges across the history of indicator efforts on the critical domains of child well-being: physical, psychological, cognitive, social, and economic well-being. Recent recognition of the importance of indicators of positive development is noted. This paper was funded by the KIDS COUNT project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.     

On the relationship between population growth and economic development]

People are producers as well as consumers. If we look at only one side and ignore the other, we will be unable to reach impartial conclusions concerning the population problem. An obvious and close relationship exists between population growth and national economic development. If the two do not match each other, there will be numerous contradictory problems. For example, if the population grows too fast, serious social and economic problems will be created, such as a rise in the demand for living resources, an oversupply of the labor force, unemployment, and an insufficient availability of arable land, a shortage of public housing, more demand for health care and public transportation, and cultural and educational enterprises. In addition, a rapid population growth may cause more problems for the natural environment. As a result of overpopulation, the pressure on natural resources will be intensified and may therefore cause damage to the environment and create an ecological imbalance. All the above may bring very serious difficulties and obstacles to the advancement of socialism and modernized constructions. To avoid this, we must try to solve the population problem thoroughly and maintain a balanced relationship between the population growth and economic development.     

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.     

Modernization Theory: How to Measure and Operationalize it When Gauging Variation in Women’s Representation?

Modernization theory, one of the most influential theories in the social sciences, holds that as the composition of the economy develops, from an agrarian to a postindustrial society, communities will develop post-materialist values, which should lead to a higher representation of women in elected positions. However, while this reasoning is intuitive, there is no consensus on how to operationalize and measure this process. Existing studies use different types of national level proxy measures such as aggregated survey data on public attitudes on gender equality and broad development indicators such as per capita GDP or population density. In this article, we not only highlight that existing strategies are suboptimal as they run the risk of creating ecological inference fallacies for the former type of indicators and measurement error for the second type of factors, but also offer some finer grained operationalization of modernization theory at the regional level. In more detail, we illustrate that modernization is a multifaceted concept, which is primarily characterized by urbanization, women’s increased labor force participation and a strengthening of the tertiary sector. Using an original dataset on 285 European regions we illustrate that any of these three characteristics of modernization has an independent impact on women’s representation.     

Relative Standing and Subjective Well-Being in South Africa: The Role of Perceptions,Expectations and Income Mobility

Most studies that explore the impact of relative standing on subjective well-being use objective measures of the individual’s relative position, such as the mean income of the reference group or the individual’s ranking in the relevant income distribution. In this paper, using a new household survey from South Africa, we are able to derive subjective measures of relative standing, as information is collected on individuals’ perceptions of where they rank in the income distribution. We find considerable differences between objective and subjective measures of an individual’s relative ranking. Furthermore, our results suggest that an individual’s perceived relative status has a significantly larger effect on subjective well-being than objective measures of relative status based on reported income. We also examine the effects on subjective well-being of how individuals perceive their relative position in the income distribution to have changed since childhood, and what they expect their relative position to be in the future. We find that future upward mobility has a smaller effect than upward mobility compared to one’s past, suggesting that life satisfaction is influenced more by what has been achieved than by anticipated achievements.     

Relative Economic Position and Subjective Well-Being in a Poor Society: Does Relative Position Indicator Matter?

Concern for relative income (or status in general) may have important implications for poverty and individual well-being. This paper examines the impact of relative economic position on individual’s level of well-being among poor communities in rural Ethiopia. The analysis uses a self-reported measure of overall life-evaluation as a measure of individual well-being. Despite the fact that well-being is multidimensional, the impact of non-money metric measures of relative economic position on individual well-being has not been given a lot of attention in the literature. In this study, relative economic position is measured using consumption data, asset index, and respondent’s own perception of relative wealth. The asset index captures the non-monetary dimensions of economic welfare, including education, physical assets, and social capital. We use data from the 2004 and 2009 waves of the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey and employ a multilevel modelling technique to account for individual and group level heterogeneity in our empirical analysis. We find no significant relationship between individual well-being and relative economic position measured with in consumption terms. In contrast, we do find a significant negative impact of relative position on individual well-being when we use asset indices and respondent’s own perception of relative wealth to measure relative economic position. Our findings suggest that when individuals compare themselves with others, they evaluate various aspects of their life, including their financial conditions, asset holdings, and social relations, which are hardly captured by consumption or income data in many poor countries.     

The Cost of Well-Being

It is by now common knowledge that in switching from GDP to alternative, multidimensional, measures of collective well-being one can provide a better account of a country’s socio-economic conditions. Such a gain, however, comes at the price of losing output-to-input type of link between well-being and the resources necessary to make it available. Since well-being measures are not meant to be only an exercise in documentation, but also to inform policies and priorities, we propose a method to build a measure of well-being in the form of a single index, as for GDP, which takes into account: (1) the social and environmental costs, not considered in the GDP, and (2) the use of conventional resources (capital and labour), not considered in the currently available multidimensional measures of well-being. We use a Data Envelopment Analysis type of model, integrated with Principal Component Analysis, to evaluate OECD countries’ relative efficiency in providing well-being. Our results show that the costs of producing well-being have a large and significant impact on the resulting index of well-being. Therefore, high efficiency in providing well-being and high income cannot be considered a proxy to each other. In addition, it is shown that countries react differently to the different costs of well-being: poor countries are, on average, more efficient in terms of conventional inputs (labour and capital), while rich countries have higher efficiency indices relative to social and environmental costs. The close to zero correlation between GDP and well-being indices for rich countries provides new support to the “Easterlin paradox”.     

A preliminary discussion of population law]

Population law is basically a kind of social law and it has a system of very rich content. Population law is subject to the influence of both nature and society. Nature has a certain influence and function on the population, including its natural restricting force on the population, such as the life and death cycle, metabolism, and continuation of life. In addition, the natural environment also has a restricting force on the population; people have to live on water, air, sunshine, earth, and other natural resources. People whould have to follow fixed natural laws in order to live, or the continuation of life would be in jeapordy. Society also has some influence on population law and its restriction on the population is mainly through the means of production. On the one hand, it is the function upon the population from the nature, characteristics and condition of productivity. On the other hand, it is the function upon population from production relations. Socialist population law is a major branch of the entire population law. In this particular branch, the main contents include shared individual production and material need and a population development plan which deals with employment, population distribution, and other fundamental problems.     

“延龙图”区域人口发展战略研究

结合延边州及"延龙图"区域的自然、经济、社会发展情况,制定了"延龙图"区域未来20年的人口发展战略目标及主要任务,并提出促进"延龙图"区域人口增长的对策建议。通过动员社会资源的共同努力,促进人口资源的优化配置,来实现"延龙图"区域经济社会的全面协调可持续发展,将"延龙图"区域打造成吉林省东部地区的中心城市,确立它在东北亚图们江地区开发中的战略地位、在长白山旅游发展中的枢纽地位、在自治州体制改革中的示范地位、在东北地区具有民族地域个性的特色地位。     

In Social Capital We Trust?

It has been widely postulated in the literature that social capital is positively related to or is the same as trust. The present study presents three theoretical perspectives regarding how individual and organizational social capital may be related to network trust and generalized trust: the compositional element (Putnam), functional equivalence (Fukuyama), and mutual independence (Lin). To each of these perspectives we allocated distinct measures of individual and organizational network mechanisms considering their operational definition of social capital. Using nationally representative data sets from the United States and China, we developed a comparative research design through which the three perspectives were put into an empirical test. In conclusion, we found that the compositional element perspective is most prone to cross-national contingencies, whereas the mutual independence perspective is freer from such contextual influences. In particular, the positive association between number of membership in voluntary associations (organizational social capital) and generalized trust exists only in the United States, whereas individual social capital based on network diversity and resources is unrelated to generalized trust in neither country. Lastly, the functional equivalence perspective does not get empirical support from the data, particularly with regard to the proposed negative relationship between network closure and generalized trust. These findings challenge the assumptions concerning the positive association or equivalence between social capital and trust in the literature.

     

Household strategies in the face of resource scarcity in coastal Ghana: are they associated with development priorities?

In many developing regions, women and young girls spend several hours daily in the collection of natural resources. Still the link between these household resource strategies and stakeholder perceptions of development priorities remains unexplored. This project examines this association with survey data representative of the adult population from Ghana’s Coastal Region. Although natural resource scarcity and the sustainability of resource use represent key development challenges, there are others (e.g., energy, sanitation, employment, and educational opportunities). As such, even in the face of natural resource scarcity, individuals may place greater importance on other dimensions of development, especially if household resource strategies are perceived as relatively efficient. The analytical focus here is on water and the results suggest that gender roles shape household water collection strategies, while also shaping these strategies’ perceived opportunity costs. Specifically, Ghanian adults more often see drinking water provision as their primary development need when water sources are distant and/or when male household members collect water (particularly male heads). In the end, I argue that social science inquiry benefits by contextualizing social dynamics within environmental context, particularly within cultural settings in which human subsistence is intimately tied to the state of the natural environment.     

Environmental Change,Risky Sexual Behavior,and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: Linkages Through Livelihoods in Rural Haiti

Local natural resources are central to rural livelihoods across much of the developing world. Such “natural capital” represents one of several types of assets available to households as they craft livelihood strategies. In order to explore the potential for environmental scarcity and change to contribute to perpetuation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we examine the association between declining natural capital and engaging in risky sexual behaviors, as potentially another livelihood strategy. Such an association has been demonstrated in Kenya and Tanzania, through the fish-for-sex trade. To explore the possibility of this connection within rural Haitian livelihoods we use Demographic and Health Survey data, with a focus on rural women, combined with vegetation measures generated from satellite imagery. We find that lack of condom use in recent sexual encounters is associated with local environmental scarcity—controlling for respondent age, education, religion and knowledge of AIDS preventive measures. The results suggest that explicit consideration of the environmental dimensions of HIV/AIDS may be of relevance in scholarship examining factors shaping the pandemic.     

A Comparative Analysis of the Validity of US State- and County-Level Social Capital Measures and Their Associations with Population Health

The goals of this study were to validate a number of available collective social capital measures at the US state and county levels, and to examine the relative extent to which these social capital measures are associated with population health outcomes. Measures of social capital at the US state level included aggregate indices based on the Annenberg National Health Communication Survey and the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), Petris Social Capital Index (PSCI), Putnam’s index, and Kim et al.’s scales. County-level measures consisted of PSCI, Rupasingha et al.’s social capital index, and a BRFSS-derived measure. These measures, except for the PSCI, showed evidence of acceptable validity. Moreover, we observed differences across the social capital measures in their associations with population health outcomes. The implications of the findings for future research in this area were discussed.     

Psychology's role in the conserving society

Because the earth's natural resources are finite and are growing increasingly more difficult to exploit, energy and resource conservation will soon become essential to our way of life. Psychologists and other social scientists can help in that transition, and recently they have begun to do relevant research in several areas: environmental pollution, recycling and solid wastes, reducing litter, and energy usage and conservation. Research approaches that have been used include studies of environmental and energy attitudes, behavioral research, social interaction studies, community conservation programs, and large-scale consumer research. More work is especially needed on the topics of transportation energy use, industrial and commercial energy conservation, and community action campaigns. Research efforts should increasingly utilize measures of actual behavior and actual energy usage, long-term longitudinal approaches, realistic field settings, and costeffective procedures. In addition to doing research, psychologists can contribute to the advent of the conserving society through program evaluation studies, proposals for innovation, dissemination of validated scientific knowledge, and offering policy advice.     

The Compensating Income Variation of Social Capital

There is a small but growing literature on the determinants of social capital. Most of these studies use a measure of trust to define social capital empirically. In this paper we use three different measures of social capital: the size of the individual’s social network, the extent of their social safety net and membership of unions or associations. A second contribution to the literature is that we analyze what social capital contributes to our well-being. Based on this, we calculate the compensating income variation of social capital. We find differences in social capital when we differentiate according to individual characteristics such as education, age, place of residence, household composition and health. Household income generally has a statistically significant effect. We find a significant effect of social capital on␣life␣satisfaction. Consequently, the compensating income variation of social capital is substantial. Thanks to Tijl Woortman for his research assistance.     

Subjective Well-Being in China: Associations with Absolute,Relative, and Perceived Economic Circumstances

Numerous studies examining the impact of income on subjective well-being (SWB) have found significant positive relationships exhibiting decreasing marginal returns. However, the impact of economic circumstances on SWB is better captured through a combination of income, wealth (per capita net worth), and perceived and relative economic conditions. Using data from the Chinese Household Income Project, I find that within rural and urban China, wealth significantly predicts SWB, exhibiting decreasing marginal returns independent of more common measures of economic circumstances such as income and occupational status. Within urban China, these associations decrease in magnitude and significance with the addition of objective relative measures of wealth and income. Finally, I find that subjective perceptions of relative standard of living are strongly associated with SWB independent of other measures. These results highlight the importance of using multiple objective and subjective measures of economic circumstances, demonstrating potential limitations of studies that have focused exclusively on income as a predictor of well-being. Results are interpreted within the context of China’s changing social and economic structure.     

‘There are Alternatives,but Your Social Life is Curtailed’: Poverty and Sports Participation from an Insider Perspective

Sports is generally believed to improve well-being and to bring benefits ranging from health promotion to the enhancement of social capital. At the same time, research has indicated that living in poverty negatively affects the likelihood of practicing sports. Yet, from the literature, it is not clear how the lower participation rates of people in poverty should be understood. Based on 33 semi-structured interviews and four focus groups, we (1) explore the meaning of sports participation for people in poverty and (2) evaluate the opportunities for practicing sports. As their voices often remain unheard, we take the perspective of people in poverty as a starting point. The results indicate, amongst other things, that sports practice remains possible when living with few resources, but potential social benefits of sports often stay out of reach. The link between scarcity of resources and social exclusion, as documented in the literature on poverty, is strongly present in the field of sports as well. In order to enhance the actual opportunities for doing sports, activities need to be organised in a financially, socially and physically safe way.     

出生性别比失衡与社会政策的柔性调节

出生人口性别比失衡问题日趋严重．不进行治理将带来严重的社会后果。目前采取的一些治理人口出生性别比的措施。如加强宣传教育、加强计划生育管理等。这些手段在一定程度上能对人们的生育观念和行为产生改观,但要实现全社会出生性别比的正常化需从根本上改变人们的生育意愿．放弃男孩为首选的生育偏好。这种观念的转变和形成应从社会政策入手和进行调节。根据个体生命周期中不同的个体和社会需求．依靠教育政策、生育政策、社会保障制度、就业政策及退休政策等具体的社会政策对女性和独女户家庭进行关爱和倾斜．通过利益导向创设出生女有福气的生育观和“关爱女孩、尊重女性”的性别价值现。在实施社会政策时,应发挥各项社会政策的灵活性;同时各项社会政策之间应该具有联动性和协调性。此即是社会政策的柔性调节。     

Religious Transformations and Generalized Trust in Sub-Saharan Africa

The social cohesion literature repeatedly criticizes a lack of consensus regarding the theoretical conceptualization of the construct. The current paper attempts to clarify this ambiguity by providing a literature review on the recent approaches. By taking a bird’s eye view on previous conceptualizations of social cohesion we emphasize that in the majority of approaches there is in fact more overlap in the concept than has so far been assumed. In particular, we suggest three essential dimensions of social cohesion: (1) social relations, (2) identification with the geographical unit, and (3) orientation towards the common good. Each dimension is further differentiated into several sub-dimensions. We argue that additional elements identified in the literature (shared values, inequality, quality of life) are rather determinants or consequences of social cohesion, but not constituting elements. Suggestions for future research are discussed.     

已婚独生女相对资源优势与单独居住选择研究——基于苏州市吴中区的调查

第一代独生子女大规模进入婚育年龄,由于此类家庭关系的特殊性,势必对传统的家庭居住方式产生冲击。文章利用2006年苏州市20-29岁育龄妇女家庭户调查资料,建立已婚独生女资源优势变量,通过列联交互表与卡方检验的方法,判断资源优势与独生女单独居住的关联性。研究结果表明：已婚独生女单独居住与其社会资本和文化资本优势呈显著负相关,与其经济资本优势呈正相关。夫妻间资本优势影响家庭权力分配,并影响到居住决策,且社会资本和文化资本优势影响力超过经济资本优势。鉴于此,本文提出“优势一选择”理论予以解释,认为独生女依据自己不同的比较资源优势,依次选择自己意愿的居住方式。