Explaining cross-national differences in marriage, cohabitation, and divorce in Europe, 1990-2000

European countries differ considerably in their marriage patterns. The study presented in this paper describes these differences for the 1990s and attempts to explain them from a macro-level perspective. We find that different indicators of marriage (i.e., marriage rate, age at marriage, divorce rate, and prevalence of unmarried cohabitation) cannot be seen as indicators of an underlying concept such as the 'strength of marriage'. Multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses are estimated with countries as units and panel regression models are estimated in which annual time series for multiple countries are pooled. Using these models, we find that popular explanations of trends in the indicators - explanations that focus on gender roles, secularization, unemployment, and educational expansion - are also important for understanding differences among countries. We also find evidence for the role of historical continuity and societal disintegration in understanding cross-national differences.     

A Review Essay on the Measurement of Child Well-Being

Research on indicators related to the state of child well-being is a growing field that has experienced several changes over time. The growing supply of data on children, as well as the need to facilitate conclusions and to track trends, has led researchers to develop a number of child well-being indexes. This paper critically reviews the most recent and relevant child well-being indexes, i.e., the Index of Child and Youth Well-Being in the United States, the Child Well-being Index for the European Union, the Microdata Child Well-being Index, and the Deprivation Index. The study focuses primarily on the contributions and innovations the indexes have brought to the field, making a critical assessment of the methods used in the construction of the indexes and identifying their main limitations.     

How are the Kids Doing? How do We Know?

With a focus on the United States, this paper addresses the basic social indicators question: How are we doing? More specifically, with respect to children, how are our kids (including adolescents and youths) doing? These questions can be addressed by comparisons: (1) to past historical values, (2) to other contemporaneous units (e.g., comparisons among subpopulations, states, regions, countries), or (3) to goals or other externally established standards. The Child and Youth Well-Being Index (CWI), which we have developed over the past decade, uses all three of these points of comparison. The CWI is a composite index based on 28 social indicator time series of various aspects of the well-being of children and youth in American society that date back to 1975, which is used as a base year for measuring changes (improvements or deterioration) in subsequent years. The CWI is evidence-based not only in the sense that it uses time series of empirical data for its construction, but also because the 28 indicators are grouped into seven domains of well-being or areas of social life that have been found to define the conceptual space of the quality of life in numerous studies of subjective well-being. Findings from research using the CWI reported in the paper include: (1) trends in child and youth well-being in the United States over time, (2) international comparisons, and (3) best-practice analyses.     

Predictors of satisfaction with housing and neighbourhood: A nationwide study in the Republic of Ireland

The present paper reports results from a nationwide study, based on a representative sample in the Republic of Ireland. It is part of a harmonised study of subjective social indicators which has been carried out in eight member countries of the European Community. The data, which were obtained by survey techniques, are largely subjective or perceptual in nature. However, objective data were also obtained, thus permitting direct comparisons, in many cases, between objective conditions and subjective measures related to housing and neighbourhood to determine which characteristics were most highly predictive of overall satisfaction with housing and overall satisfaction with neighbourhood. In addition, the relationships between housing and neighbourhood variables and more global attitudinal variables (i.e., life satisfaction and anomia) were explored.     

European Identity: An Analysis of Measurement Equivalence Across Countries and Mode of Data Collection in the European Values Survey 2017/2018

The study of European Identity has gradually become central to social sciences in the past decades. The enlargement of the European Union, as well as the economic crises from a decade ago called into question the very idea of Europe as a polity, the legitimacy of the European project and the homogeneity of the European culture. Although many analyses study European Identity, most research focuses on the definition and measurement of European Identity within the EU member states. Due to the interest in European Identity within EU borders on the one hand, and the lack of comparable data on the other, the European Identity of all Europeans is rarely explored. To address this gap, we investigate the common understanding of Europeanness among those living in Europe. We define European Identity as ethnic/cultural identity as opposed to civic identity and analyse the measurement equivalence of the scale tapping European ethnic/cultural identity fielded by European Values Survey in 2017 in 30 European countries. The results point out to a common understanding of Europeanness among those living in Europe, in ethnic terms, not in cultural ones. Methodologically, the analyses proved that the scale is suitable for cross-national comparisons among countries, but the comparability should be refrained to comparing means of the scale across countries. The mode of data collection does not impact on the comparability of the scale in four of the six countries that used mixed modes of data collection.

     

Social Health Indicators and Economic Growth: Evidence from East Asia and Pacific,Middle East and North Africa,South Asia,and Sub-Saharan Africa

The objective of this study is to empirically investigate a two-way statistical relationship between the social health indicators and economic growth in the context of four major regions of the world i.e., East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. To recognize the relationship between the two variables, a time series, co-integration and Granger causality tests have been employed. Aggregate secondary data pertaining to these four regions from 1975 to 2011 on economic growth and social health indicators i.e., infant mortality, child abuse, child poverty, unemployment, weekly wages, health insurance coverage, teenage suicide, teenage drug abuse, high school dropouts, poverty, out-of-pocket health costs, homicides, alcohol related traffic fatalities, food insecurity, income inequality, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, basic health units and rural health centers has been used for analysis. This study evaluates four alternative but equally plausible hypotheses, each with different policy implications. These are: (1) social health indicators Granger cause economic growth, (2) economic growth Granger cause social health indicators (the conventional view), (3) There is a bi-directional causality between the two variables and (4) Both variables are causality independent (although highly correlated). The empirical results only moderately support the conventional view that economic growth has significant long run casual effect on social health indicators in East Asia and Pacific, MENA, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The present study find evident of unidirectional causality running towards economic growth to social health indicators, although, there are some bidirectional causality also exists between the variables. The percentage of unidirectional causality between economic growth and social health indicators is larger than bidirectional or neutrality hypothesis.     

Migration and Intergenerational Replacement in Europe

There are long‐standing concerns over low fertility levels in Europe and an increasingly important debate on the extent to which migration can compensate for below‐replacement fertility. To inform this debate, a wide array of indicators have been developed to assess the joint influence of fertility, mortality, and migration on birth replacement and intergenerational replacement. These indicators are based on various models and assumptions and some are particularly data demanding. In this article we propose a simple method to assess how far migration alters the extent of replacement for a birth cohort as it ages. We term the measure the overall replacement ratio (ORR). It is calculated by taking the size of a female birth cohort at selected ages divided by the average size of the cohorts of mothers in the year of birth. We present estimates of the ORR for a range of European countries representing different replacement regimes. We demonstrate that for many countries net migration has become a key factor in their population trends during the last few decades.     

A Stalled Revolution? Change in Women's Labor Force Participation during Child-Rearing Years,Europe and the United States 1996–2016

While women's labor force participation rates (LFPRs) in the United States stalled over the last quarter-century, European countries exhibited a variety of trajectories. We draw on demographic and gender theories of women's life course to understand changes in women's LFPR during their prime child-rearing years. We build expectations about how aggregate trends may be driven by shifts in the prevalence of key demographic events such as child-rearing (i.e., compositional) versus shifts in the association of these events with women's LFP (i.e., behavioral). We use data from the European Union Labour Force Surveys and the US Current Population Survey in Kitagawa–Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition models to decompose trends in women's LFPR from 1996 to 2016 across 18 countries by educational attainment, partnership status, and parental status for women aged 20–44. Compositional and behavioral shifts positively contribute to higher LFPR in most countries, but lower rates in several others. Behavioral change is not widely shared across groups of women. Partnered mothers without college degrees are the main contributors to behavioral change and show the greatest variability across countries. We suggest greater research attention to this “missing middle,” as their LFP is key to understanding change during this period.     

A Case for Developing Community Drug Indicators

The EU Action Plan on Drugs (2005?C2008) calls for member states of the European Union to provide information on five key epidemiological indicators. These are: general population surveys, prevalence and patterns of problem drug use, drug related infectious diseases, drug related deaths and mortality of drug users, and demand for drug treatment. The goal is to improve the comparability of data across the Member States, which is a central task of the EMCDDA (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction). Ireland has made progress on a national level in meeting this obligation. Currently the core information systems used to monitor the drugs problem in Ireland and to inform policy making are in the health and law enforcement areas including treatment, mortality and crime data. The dominance of such objective indicators and treatment outcome measures has contributed to obscuring the view of communities experiencing drugs problems on a day to day basis. The data are summations of the individual experience of drug problems and contribute little to understanding the broader question of how drug problem effect communities. This article draws on a community drugs study to review the contribution of traditional indicators of drug problems and consider some of the limitations of this data. It then presents an analysis of community data to identify possible community indicators of drug problems.     

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.     

From Birth to Death: A Social Monitoring Framework from New Zealand

The paper begins by outlining the development of social indicators work and social monitoring at the national level in New Zealand and comments on how this relates to the international movement. It describes the 'key' indicators/life stage approach developed by the New Zealand Planning Council in the early 1980s. This exercise continues from a university base and the fourth report in the series, entitled Tracking Social Change in New Zealand was published in early 1998. Examples are presented to show how the results can be used to highlight the policy implications of changing social trends.     

Trends in senescent life expectancy

The distinction between senescent and non-senescent mortality proves to be very valuable for describing and analysing age patterns of death rates. Unfortunately, standard methods for estimating these mortality components are lacking. The first part of this paper discusses alternative methods for estimating background and senescent mortality among adults and proposes a simple approach based on death rates by causes of death. The second part examines trends in senescent life expectancy (i.e., the life expectancy implied by senescent mortality) and compares them with trends in conventional longevity indicators between 1960 and 2000 in a group of 17 developed countries with low mortality. Senescent life expectancy for females rises at an average rate of 1.54 years per decade between 1960 and 2000 in these countries. The shape of the distribution of senescent deaths by age remains relatively invariant while the entire distribution shifts over time to higher ages as longevity rises.     

A Gender Wellbeing Composite Indicator: The Best-Worst Global Evaluation Approach

In this paper we present a new global evaluation methodology for constructing composite indicators. Given the limitations in the construction of wellbeing indicators that include a gender perspective, this paper proposes separate measures for men and women, using new linear programming models to improve the traditional Data Envelopment Analysis models. We obtain composite indicators using common weights (which are most and least favourable) so that the indicators’ values are able to discriminate between all units and provide a global vision of each one. This approach does not require prior knowledge of the weights for initial indicators, nor does it require a normalization method. Thus, the new composite indicator is less subjective than others. For the practical implementation of this proposal, we use the countries of the European Union as an example.     

欧债危机下的养老金制度改革——从福利国家到高债国家的教训

文章从人口老龄化的角度,分析了老龄化成本的含义和构成及其导致希腊陷入债务危机的诱因,认为欧洲尤其是希腊的养老金体系存在的替代率过高、待遇率严重失衡、养老金财富总值超出支付能力等问题提升了老龄化的财务成本;作者在分析了欧债危机下世界改革养老金的趋势后,认为中国养老金制度中存在参数不合理、缺乏个人激励机制、市场激励因素弱化、再分配因素失衡等潜在的财务风险,建议重视第二支柱的建设以部分转移第一支柱的财务风险,逐渐提高退休年龄以重建科学的制度参数,重塑账户的激励功能以增强制度收入能力,建立制度防火墙以规避潜在财务风险。     

A Perception Survey for the Evaluation of Urban Quality of Life in Kocaeli and a Comparison of the Life Satisfaction with the European Cities

Studies on urban quality of life (QoL) have been attracting lots of attention from various countries due to the deterioration of urban environment and decrease of the urban QoL. These studies that have been supported by international organizations such as United Nations, World Bank, OECD, European Commission and EUROSTAT (European Statistics) involve comparative assessment of life satisfaction in the European cities and comparing cities facilitate the exchange of experiment and improve the quality of local policies. The main objective of this study is to measure the local perceptions of QoL in Kocaeli, which is one of the important industrial cities of Turkey and compare the life satisfaction with the European cities. Generally, two different types of indicators have been used: objective and subjective indicators. The objective indicators cover five fields: socio-economic aspects, participation in civic life, education and training, environment and culture, and leisure. The subjective indicators are mainly for valuation of QoL perceptions in a city. In this research, a perception survey will be carried out to measure the local perceptions of QoL in Kocaeli. This survey will present on issues for which the residents in the Kocaeli had widely diverging opinions: employment opportunities, housing costs, safety, cleanliness of city, public transport, air quality and overall satisfaction with the QoL of their city. Thus, the study will become a major reference for local officials to improve QoL in Kocaeli and contribute to researches on QoL in cities.     

A demographic explanation for the recent rise in European fertility

Between 1998 and 2008 European countries experienced the first continent-wide increase in the period total fertility rate (TFR) since the 1960s. After discussing period and cohort influences on fertility trends, we examine the role of tempo distortions of period fertility and different methods for removing them. We highlight the usefulness of a new indicator: the tempo- and parity-adjusted total fertility rate (TFRp*). This variant of the adjusted total fertility rate proposed by Bongaarts and Feeney also controls for the parity composition of the female population and provides more stable values than the indicators proposed in the past. Finally, we estimate levels and trends in tempo and parity distribution distortions in selected countries in Europe. Our analysis of period and cohort fertility indicators in the Czech Republic, Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden shows that the new adjusted measure gives a remarkable fit with the completed fertility of women in prime childbearing years in a given period, which suggests that it provides an accurate adjustment for tempo and parity composition distortions. Using an expanded dataset for ten countries, we demonstrate that adjusted fertility as measured by TFRp* remained nearly stable since the late 1990s. This finding implies that the recent upturns in the period TFR in Europe are largely explained by a decline in the pace of fertility postponement. Other tempo-adjusted fertility indicators have not indicated such a large role for the diminishing tempo effect in these TFR upturns. As countries proceed through their postponement transitions, tempo effects will decline further and eventually disappear, thus putting continued upward pressure on period fertility. However, such an upward trend may be obscured for a few years by the effects of economic recession.     

Social Cohesion and the Labour Market: Societal Regimes of Civic Attitudes and Labour Market Regimes

The aim of this paper is to test the connections between the indicators used in the literature on social cohesion, which usually reflect ‘general’ values or behaviours, and indicators specific to a particular space, namely the labour market. A key question is the stability of the social cohesion’s indicators when moving from a societal level to the labour market. Based on data from the World Value Survey, and following a restrictive definition of social cohesion, a comparison is done, for European countries. Examination of the situation in the two spheres makes it possible to identify more or less homogeneous groups of countries and also to point to instabilities. ‘Regimes’ of social cohesion begin to emerge. As in most analyses, the Nordic countries (excluding Finland) have high scores in all the dimensions. Conversely, most of the new EU member states from the former Eastern bloc have low scores, particularly in the horizontal dimension of trust between individuals.     

Cross-Cultural Analyses of Determinants of Quality of Life and Mental Health: Results from the Eurohis Study

Recent projects on international instrument development have produced a wide array of health indicators that may be used for cross-cultural field-testing, however more information on their cross-cultural performance in relation to health determinants is necessary. The current study approaches one step for international conceptual validation by analysing the association between various health determinants and different types of health outcomes (mental health, quality of life) across a range of countries or geographical areas. The current study is based on the EUROHIS project that has been conducted in a sample of 4849 adults across 10 European countries. Results highlight that interactions between health determinants with subjective mental health, general health and quality of life (QoL) differ between Western European countries, Eastern European countries and the Newly Associated States as well as Israel. Using a MIMIC model approach, we were able to show that the impact of each of the sociodemographic variables cannot be interpreted on the basis of its single loading but only seeing the interacting with other indicators. Future studies should include sociodemographics in MIMIC models in each latent factor before carrying out regressions on a larger scale. Future investigations will require larger and representative samples to (a) test models on latent factors of mental health and QoL and (b) on the basis of these findings test overall structural models across countries.     

An Index of Child Well-being in the European Union

While the living conditions of children and young people in the European Union have gained increasing recognition across the EU, the well-being of children is not monitored on the European level. Based on a rights-based, multi-dimensional understanding of child well-being we analyse data already available for the EU 25, using series data as well as comparative surveys of children and young people. We compare the performance of EU Member States on eight clusters with 23 domains and 51 indicators and give a picture of children’s overall well-being in the European Union. The clusters are children’s material situation, housing, health, subjective well-being, education, children’s relationships, civic participation and risk and safety.     

The ‘Failed State Index’ Offers More than Just a Simple Ranking

The role of indicators to measure trends in every area of interest is increasing. Especially in the field of politics and sociology, where modeling based on multiple indicators typically is difficult, multi-indicator systems call for attention. Multi-indicator systems are most often the first step to derive a ranking indicator. Correspondingly there is a high interest in how to transform multi-indicator systems into a one-dimensional metric scale. The scientific discipline of decision support systems provides many well-known techniques, classical examples are PROMETHEE, ELECTRE, DEA or the simple TOPSIS. The mathematical technique is pretty sophisticated, therefore the simplest variant, namely the weighted sum of indicators plays its role too, just because of its simplicity and transparency. Although the need of a derivation of a one-dimensional scale is evident, we argue that there is an interim step, between the multi-indicator system and the ranking index, provided by simple elements of partial order theory. This interim step bears useful information too and in this paper we show how and which useful additional information can be derived. We derive for example a bias-free sensitivity study, where the indicator “chronic and sustained human flight” turns out to be the most important indicator within the multi-indicator system of 12 indicators, which are the basis of the Failed State Index.