Doing better than the optimum

There may be a need for operationalizing basic social indicators like unemployment, inflation, crime, and others in such a way as to allow for going beyond what has traditionally been considered as the zero point of unemployment, inflation, crime, or other social indicators. Doing so can be helpful in stimulating greater societal achievement and happiness, especially with appropriate incentives and a growth perspective. Doing so can also facilitate better comparisons of alternative policies across nations and across other policies.     

A system of social indicators for the CMEA countries and for Hungary

This paper discusses the reasons for the growing demand for social indicators in Hungary and in other European socialist countries. A brief history of the construction of a system of social indicators within the framework of the Council of Mutual Economic Aid is given. The subsystems and the main indicators are described. The present practice and the problems of social classifications used in the social indicator systems and in social surveys are treated. In addition to the existing data sources of social indicators, sample surveys were considered to be necessary to provide a full and detailed view of Hungarian society. In addition to objective indicators, recently, subjective indicators have also been collected.     

Indicators of Social Isolation: A Comparison Based on Survey Data from Germany

The paper presents a data-based comparison of three indicators of social isolation that are frequently used in contemporary social research: (a) low frequency of social contact with friends, relatives, and neighbors (social contact indicator); (b) absence of a discussion network (discussion network indicator); (c) absence of social support (support indicator). All three indicators are in line with an understanding of social isolation as the absence of close personal relationships. However, as shown in this paper, they are correlated only weakly to each other and lead to different results concerning the overall share of social isolation, age disparities, and gender differences of social isolation. Against this background, the paper proceeds with considerations on the content validity and criterion validity of the three indicators. Different versions of each indicator are scrutinized to gain insights on content validity. Conclusions on criterion validity are drawn from an examination of the correlations between the indicators and health, poverty, satisfaction with family life, and satisfaction with social life. Findings suggest a higher validity of the social contact indicator compared to the other two indicators. Data source is the German Socio-Economic Panel. Discussions of content validity are additionally based on analyses using the German Family Survey and the German Aging Survey.     

Testing the Comparability of Different Types of Social Indicators Across Groups

The social indicator movement has realized a considerable increase in importance during the last 50 years. This happened not the least by the publications in the journal Social Indicators Research. Social indicators have been developed for many aspects of life. The scores on these indicators often are compared through time and across groups. An essential requirement for such research is that the measures used are comparable through time and across groups. The comparability through time is not such a big problem but the comparability of measures across groups is not so obvious. This requires harmonization of indicators based on objective variables and invariance testing for indicators based on subjective and objective variables. In this paper we discuss how the comparability of different types of social indicators based on subjective and objective variables can be tested using invariance testing. This is a relevant issue because the existing testing procedure is designed for only one type of social indicators and this test is not directly applicable on the other types of social indicators.     

The Development of the Good Relations Measurement Framework in Britain: A Template for Experiential Social Measurement

This article explores the development of the Good Relations Measurement Framework (GRMF), the first attempt in Britain to create a framework designed to measure how people experience their lives, specifically in relation to their interactions with each other. It provides a reference point for others seeking to construct social indicator measurement frameworks which capture the experiential in the social policy field. In a wider sense, it provides a case study of the use of social indicators within the policy process in the modern polity. The overall objective of the GRMF is to measure the state of Good Relations in Britain. Seven key areas emerged as being crucial for the development of measurement frameworks during the construction of the GRMF. Firstly, a decision has to be taken about the extent to which social measurement frameworks are confined to measurement only or are to have a normative element. Secondly, a working definition of the subject area is needed early in the process. Thirdly, an element of consultation with the public is important. A fourth issue relates to the practical method of construction through the use of ‘long lists’ of potential indicators, and finding a balance between an ‘ideal’ list of potential indicators emerging from public consultation and a second list of existing indicators drawn from existing surveys. A fifth issue relates to the availability of social indicator data at an appropriate geographical level. A sixth issue is that social indicators drawn from different surveys are not always comparable. A final factor is that while quantitative indicators are useful as a tool of social measurement, qualitative research adds a further dimension which is especially important in particular circumstances.     

Measuring rural development in Nigeria: The place of social indicators

The use of economic growth indicators for the purpose of measuring rural development has for a long time been in practice in Nigeria and in many other developing nations. The inadequacy of this measure in depicting development in the area of societal well-being has suggested that social indicators could be a more meaningful tool to monitor and evaluate the level and conditions of rural development. This paper highlights the information needs for, and problems of incorporating social indicators in the measurement of rural development in Nigeria. It is recognized that for social indicators to be a useful tool in a place such as rural Nigeria, they must reflect the sociocultural peculiarities and the life style of the country's rural population. The paper finally suggests an improvement of the quality of social statistics in rural Nigeria to enhance their functional values to planners and policy makers.     

Some new directions for social indicators in the U.S. Department of Agriculture

While there is considerable research activity within the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding the construction of social indicators, the current data base is not adequate to construct a reasonably complete system of indicators for rural development of other rural policy concerns. It is argued that rural development indicators must be able to sense not only the outputs of social institutions and organizations expressed as programs or policies, but also the impacts of these outputs on human needs. This requires that measures of outcomes or the impact of institutions on individuals, such as those found in studies of subjective estimates of life quality, be incorporated into the rural data base. It is suggested, that some of the expertise and budget allocated to the collection of enumerative data be shifted to the collection of subjective estimates of life quality data tailored to the specific needs of rural development research and policy issues.     

On the measurement of certain aspects of social development

An attempt has been made in this paper to measure social development. There has been some limited use of per capita national income as a measure of development. A number of social indicators from various societal areas may, alternatively, better represent social development of a region. A composite index of selected social indicators has been proposed as a measure of social development. Certain existing methods of construction of composite indexes have been examined and new methods proposed using the variance-covariance matrix and intercorrelation matrix of the indicators and the concept of (Euclidean) distance. Two examples of intertemporal and international comparisons have been presented to illustrate the proposed methods.The author is grateful to Prof. M. Mukherjee under whose supervision and guidance this work was carried out. However, the views expressed in this paper are those of the author and not of the institution to which he belongs.     

Job satisfaction as an indicator of the quality of employment

It is suggested that the quality of employment should be assessed from the value perspectives of the employer and of society as well as the perspective of the worker. The prevailing conception of the nature of job satisfaction, and the associated measurement methods, provide useful but unnecessarily limited indicators of the quality of employment. An enlarged conception is offered as to the nature of job satisfaction, its causes, and its possible consequences. The implications of this conception for the utility of satisfaction measures as social indicators are examined as to three aspects: (1) The psychology of job satisfaction; (2) The sociology of job satisfaction; (2) The approach and technology of using subjective satisfaction measures in conjunction with other indicators. The view is expressed that direct measures of subjective job satisfaction are an essential component in any effort to make comparisons or monitor changes in the quality of employment, but that such measures, like other subjective and objective indicators, have ambiguous meaning if used alone.     

Walking a well-being tightrope: young people in Australia

The economic and social contribution young people make to society is increasingly important as the population ages. Yet a substantial number of young people face economic and social challenges that have an impact on their current and future well-being. Independent indicators are often used to describe what we know about how young people are faring, but these fail to show how young people are doing holistically, across their whole life. If we are to better understand and improve young people??s well-being and their lives more generally, it is critical that research establishes the connections and interactions between life domains. This paper uses a well-being framework and secondary analysis of national statistics to begin to understand how young people are faring when we cross economic outcomes with other social indicators. It argues that some Australian young people fare poorly across a large number of other social indicators and thus may be walking a tightrope in regard to their well-being and well-becoming. This paper also aims to generate a dialogue about using a well-being framework for future research with and about young people.     

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.     

Is Economic Policy Uncertainty Related to Suicide Rates? Evidence from the United States

The main objective of this paper was to see whether different countries around the world show differences in their sustainability levels as captured in the indicators from the Sustainable Society Index (SSI, Van de Kerk and Manuel in Ecol Econ 66:228–242, 2012) according to their level of income. To do so, the X-STATIS and CO-STATIS multivariate techniques were employed. With these methods, our sample of 151 countries and 21 indicators can be jointly represented along four time periods. The results obtained permit us to visualize that the groups of countries by income levels show differences in some of the variables from the SSI, because of the lack of proximities between those variables and the countries. Moreover, with the X-STATIS technique, the possible evolution of the countries or indicators over time can be represented, and with CO-STATIS, the relations between the social, economic and environmental aspects can be shown as well. From our results we were able to deduce that, on the one hand, social and economic indicators, such as Public Debt or Employment, are associated with countries having high and upper-middle incomes, for example, Chile, Israel, Malta, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Spain, Portugal, France, Poland and Czech Republic. On the other hand, countries with low and lower-middle incomes are more associated with environmental issues. Also, after finding that the differences between the countries by income levels are mainly caused by the economic indicators, we carried out two CO-STATIS analyses, one for social and economic variables, and the other for economic and environmental variables. These findings led us to deduce that, generally, the social and economic indicators are not related to each other, nor are the economic indicators related to the environmental ones. However, for some of the countries individually both relations may be possible.     

Level of development of a country: A possible new approach

Human development is a multidimensional phenomenon. It depends on a number of non-monetary aspects of life (social indicators of development). Per capita gross domestic product (PCGDP) is a means to achieve these nonmonetary aspects of life. To what extent PCGDP of a country is transformed into social development is an important phenomenon. Income elasticities of social indicators with respect to PCGDP reflect such relationship. This study attempts to find income elasticities of eight social indicators of development with respect to per capita real gross domestic product (PCRGDP) adjusted for purchasing power parity and expressed in international dollars for four points of time: 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990. The income elasticities of social indicators may be identified as necessity, luxury and inferior. On the basis of the nature of the income elasticities of the social indicators of development the level of development of a country may be identified. This paper attempts to identify the level of development of a country on the basis of the nature of the income elasticities of the social indicators of development.     

Oecd Social Indicators for 2001: a Critical Appraisal

The OECD social indicators for 2001 were critically reviewed by analysing their interrelationships across all OECD countries during the late 1990s. First, findings were provided covering the underlying structure of subsets of indicators by similarity in content as suggested by the OECD. Second, an analysis of the selected key indicators yielded five social dimensions, which were interpretedas conceptual constructs underlying the set of OECDsocial indicators at the level of the entire OECD area. Third, the relationships of each indicator withthese social dimensions were observed to aid choosing of appropriate indicators for making and evaluating social policies. Fourth, the OECDcountries were ranked according to their overall social welfare, as defined by the OECD social indicators, basedon the scores of the countries on the social dimensions. Fifth, similarities among the OECD countries were examined and it was found that the countries formed six bipolar country dimensions. The findings showed that an easily interpretable structure underlies the OECD social indicators. The paper clarified the use of the OECD social indicators for 2001 as a tool for planning and decision-making and for cross-national analyses of social policies.     

The U.S. federal effort in developing social indicators

As an introduction to this issue, some historical background of the effort of the U.S. Federal goverment in tracking social trends and making use of social indicators is reviewed. The 1934 study, Recent Social Trends in the United States, and the monographs analyzing demographic trends sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, are seen as antecedents to the current support accorded what has become a kind of triennial Social Indicators publications. The three subject-matter social indicators volumes of the Federal government — Science Indicators, The Condition of Education and Health: U.S.A. — are reviewed in this volume, and the programs of several other agencies, the Bureau. etc., to develop and communicate social indicators are discussed. The forecast for the future of social indicators includes the development of social accounts, the improvement of models that have criterion social indicators as the dependent variable, and the appreciation of the statistical system to provide the information needed for improved monitorship and understanding. These are seen as joint endeavors of the public and private sectors.     

The level of civilisation a new field for the application of social indicators

Social indicators have been recognised for some time as a means of measuring various facets of social life which were difficult to quantify, such as level of living, environment conditions and the quality of life. It is proposed here that they should also be applied to the most important of them all, and namely to the quality of the society itself. Quality of society is the outcome of society's development, it may be seen as a level of civilisation, i.e. a position on a scale between vile barbarism and highest civilisation. This position may be given a numerical expression in terms of social indicators. A suggestion for constructing such a system of indicators is presented in this paper.     

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

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

Social Cohesion as a Real-life Phenomenon: Assessing the Explanatory Power of the Universalist and Particularist Perspectives

Unlike most studies on social cohesion, this study explores the concept as a real-life macro-level phenomenon. It assesses to what extent the conceptions of social cohesion suggested by several macro-level approaches represent coherent empirically observable forms of social cohesion. Additionally it discusses two perspectives on social cohesion—the universalist and the particularist perspective. The former would expect social cohesion to be related to stages of socio-economic development. The latter hypothesizes enduring, regionally unique regimes of social cohesion resisting the homogenizing pressures of modernization. The paper finds evidence for both perspectives. On the one hand, a syndrome of social cohesion was identified consisting of trust, equality, order (i.e. lack of crime) and consensus on basic values which correlates closely with indicators of socio-economic development. This finding supports the universalist perspective. On the other hand, and consistent with the particularist perspective, the study found regionally unique patterns for Latin America, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.     

The potential of social indicators: Minimum conditions for impact at the national level as suggested by a study of the use of ‘social indicators’ 73

Empirical evidence is presented which suggests that the use of social indicators among upper level government officials in the United States is minimal at present. Further, the level of use is not likely to be increased by improved measurement procedures, aesthetically improved packaging, or more widespread dissemination of such information among persons who influence policy decisions. The power of such information can be expected to be no greater than that of ‘mere’ statistics unless deliberate effort is made to institutionalize the importance of social indicators into government operations in conjunction with policy planning, goal setting, and commitment to the use of indicators as a system of national evaluation of progress toward the achievement of societal objectives. Several recommendations are made to develop the potential of social indicators and to increase their creative and useful application in matters of public policy at the national level.     

Regional indicators in social planning

Social planning requires the application of indicators as instruments for the measuring of phenomena and processes, for monitoring, and for evaluation. The spatial polarization of socio-economic growth together with individual regional features lead to the emergence of considerable differentiations and disparities. Many of them are perceived in social consciousness as ineqities which require equalization, e.g. living conditions in the sphere of satisfaction of elementary social needs. In order to be effective, social planning must take account of, among other things, the hierarchy of centres and institutions for satisfying social needs, which most frequently amounts to 3 ranks of service (local, regional, national). Each region possesses its own central area (centre) and peripheral area (periphery). The differences between them amount to the emergence of changing socio-economic structures together with a changing dynamic in development and rate of economic growth. The gradation of social needs comprised in social planning corresponds to the hierarchy of service centres. Regional indicators serve the analysis of inter-regional disparities as related to the external “model system”, and are most frequently national means, as well as of intraregional disparities as related to the internal “model system”, which are represented by means of separate regions. The selection of an appropriate set of regional indicators requires a lot of attention. The paper points up the danger of the application of inappropriate regional indicators, which cause distortions in the spatial picture of differentiations.