Subjective Wellbeing and its Meaning for Young People in a Rural Australian Center

In Australia, wellbeing has been used as an assessment of how young people are doing by health researchers, youth researchers and psychologists. The concept ‚wellbeing’ is increasingly applied to young people in their late teens and early twenties with little discussion of young people’s perspectives. Using quantitative measures of subjective wellbeing as well as qualitative interviews to allow young people to discuss the concept of wellbeing, this study explored the levels and meanings of wellbeing among 91 young people (aged 16–24) from a rural center in south-east Australia. Key components of wellbeing for young people were found to include relationships, psychological dimensions and personal issues while family and ‚pressure’ impacted wellbeing. For most young people, wellbeing was multidimensional, holistic and centred around their own lives. Findings suggest that the Deiner et al. satisfaction with life scale was an appropriate measure of young people’s wellbeing but that health, sociology of youth and psychological approaches all contribute to young people’s perspectives of wellbeing and need to be incorporated into a more holistic measure of SWB for young people.     

Context Effects as an Illustration of Response Uncertainty –A Cautionary Tale

Many years of experience make it difficult to believe that survey answers are mostly unambiguous. For example, by going through accessible studies, a lot of problems concerning memory can be identified in the field of living conditions and in other domains. Consequently, it may be claimed that facts are seldom stored in an easily accessible manner. It is probably not the case that people – when answering questions – respond promptly and automatically. Rather, some sort of thinking activity is initiated. Accordingly, the answers may be dependent on the occasion when the questions are asked, which background information is given, how familiar the respondents are with the phenomenon in question, how much time there is for reflection, and so on. We have had the opportunity to compare answers to the same questions asked in different contexts. The results clearly indicate the existence of context effects. At the same time, the results give some clues to how these effects can be interpreted, and even avoided. Problems may be minimized if questions are more precisely formulated, if their focus is on strictly limited aspects, and if they are only about things to which people have devoted a lot of interest and thought.     

The Time-Pressure Illusion: Discretionary Time vs. Free Time

People’s welfare is a function of both time and money. People can – and, it is said, increasingly do – suffer time-poverty as well as money-poverty. It is undeniably true that people feel increasingly time pressured, particularly in dual-earner households. But much of the time devoted to paid and unpaid tasks is over and above that which is strictly necessary. In that sense, much of the time pressure that people feel is discretionary and of their own making. Using data from the 1992 Australian Time Use Survey, this paper demonstrates that the magnitude of this ‘time-pressure illusion’ varies across population groups, being least among lone parents and greatest among the childless and two-earner couples.     

Comparing Rail Passengers’ Travel Time Use in Great Britain Between 2004 and 2010

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a unique insight into aspects of stability and change regarding the travel time use of rail passengers in Great Britain between 2004 and 2010. Empirical evidence is presented on how rail passengers spend their time, how worthwhile they consider their time use to be, the extent of advance planning of their time use and how equipped for time use they are in terms of the items they have to hand when they travel. The results reveal a consistent dominance of reading for leisure, window gazing/people watching and working/studying as favoured travel time activities. Over the six-year period, the availability and use of mobile technologies has increased. Listening to music in particular has doubled in its incidence suggesting an increasing capacity for travellers to personalise the public space of the railway carriage. Most notably the analysis reveals a substantial increase in the proportion of travellers overall making very worthwhile use of their time.     

Comparing Self-Rated Health, Satisfaction and Quality of Life Scores Between Diabetics and Others Living in The Bella Coola Valley

Objective: To investigate the relative effect that diabetes has on self-rated health, satisfaction with various specific domains of life, and satisfaction with quality of life operationalized as happiness, satisfaction with life as a whole, and satisfaction with overall quality of life. Design: Mixed methods – mailed survey and chart review. Study Population: All people aged 17 years or older, residing in the Bella Coola Valley in September 2001 and having a chart at the Bella Coola Medical Clinic. Main outcome measures: Self-rated health, self-rated stress, rating of self-care received, global life satisfaction (Life as whole; Overall standard of living; Overall quality of life; and Overall happiness); and satisfaction with various domains of life. Results: A total of 968 useable surveys were returned for a response rate of 56 (968/1734). Age was negatively related to General Health, but positively related to Life Satisfaction. Not being of Aboriginal descent was positively related to all of the four global health indicators and to Subjective Well-Being. After accounting for age, race, and weight, we found that diabetics report significantly poorer self-rated health, and lower satisfaction with health scores compared to people without diabetes. Participants with diabetes who were the least compliant with their treatment regimens rated their current health significantly lower than those who were the most compliant. People with diabetes were, however, no more likely to be unhappy or dissatisfied with their lives as a whole or with the overall quality of their lives compared to people without diabetes. Among people with diabetes, however, those who used insulin did report significantly less satisfaction with the overall quality of their lives than those who didn’t use insulin. Conclusion: Diabetics understand they have poorer health than others, but they do not have poorer global life satisfaction scores. This may explain why it is difficult to get diabetics to adopt behaviours which may lower their quality of life – e.g., diet plans, lose weight, engage in exercise programs, or take medications.     

Testing a Moderated Model of Satisfaction with Urban Living using Data for Brisbane-South East Queensland,Australia

Using survey data collected from households living in the Brisbane-South East Queensland region, a rapidly growing metropolis in Australia, path analysis is used to test links between urban residents’ assessment of various urban attributes and their level of satisfaction in three urban domains-housing, neighbourhood or local area, and the wider metropolitan region – moderated by selected demographic characteristics of respondents. The analysis also shows the relative contribution of those urban domains to overall life satisfaction. Neighbourhood satisfaction is shown to be much less important in predicting overall life satisfaction than is satisfaction with housing and the region. However, neighbourhood satisfaction impacts indirectly on overall life satisfaction, mediated by regional satisfaction and housing satisfaction. In predicting regional satisfaction, the cost of living and government service provision are shown to be most important, with pollution important for younger people and parents, while improvements to transport systems are more important for the baby boomer generation. Neighbourhood satisfaction is best predicted by neighbourhood interaction and perceived crime, with neighbourhood interaction being more important for older people, while perceived crime is more important for younger and single people. Access to facilities is a poor predictor of neighbourhood satisfaction, except for parents. Satisfaction with housing is shown to be best predicted by housing age, temperature and home ownership. However, larger homes are important for parents, while young people prefer smaller homes. The importance of various urban attributes does not vary between genders. While material concerns like the cost of living and the provision of services are shown to be primary factors underlying overall satisfaction with urban living, the importance of environmental issues and demand for smaller homes might be expected to increase over time.     

Normative Life Satisfaction in Chinese Societies

Research over several decades about subjective life satisfaction has led to the conclusion that the majority of people seem to be satisfied with their lives when their social and physical needs are met. In empirical studies which have used self-report instruments, this trend is reflected in respondents’ consistent preference for the positive end of scales. This led to the suggestion that there is a normative range for life satisfaction, which should hold true for general population data and, therefore, serve as a reference point, or a gold standard, for comparison (Cummins Social Indicators Research, 35, 179–200, 1995, Social Indicators Research, 43, 307–334, 1998). Subsequent research has shown that Western and non-Western samples generally conform to the normative range, but more data are needed from Chinese societies. In an attempt to remedy this situation, this paper investigates normative life satisfaction there. This paper reanalyses published and unpublished data from various Chinese societies (People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan) in order to confirm whether or not they lie within the normative range for non-Western countries. The results provide support for the relevance of Cummins’s normative range in Chinese societies. That the normative range generalised to the present study is a very useful finding, as it supports its utility for Chinese samples, and adds support to a theoretical explanation – i.e. the Wellbeing Homeostatisis theory—in Chinese groups.     

Rethinking of Economic Growth and Life Satisfaction in Post-Wwii Japan – A Fresh Approach

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been utilized by academics and policy makers to indicate the economic well-being of the people. However, economic growth measures cannot capture fully the overall well-being of the people. This paper has tested quality of economic growth in Japan after World War II as to whether it has brought about positive outcome in the well-being of its citizens. Comparison between GDP and GPI (Genuine Progress Index) has revealed that GDP does not fit as well with people’s life satisfaction trend as GPI. Prefecture-based rankings on GDP, Human Development Index (HDI) and Life Satisfaction have shown that there are clear gaps between objective measures and subjective measures to indicate the overall well-being of the people. Also, analysis on major determinants for people’s life satisfaction reveals that older people, women, non-employed people, and those who live in subsidized housings felt satisfied with their life.     

The Importance of Fairness and Equity for the Marital Satisfaction of Older Women

ABSTRACT

In all societies, people are concerned with social justice. “It's just not right” is a fairly common lament. In these two studies, we interviewed 240 older women, who ranged in age from 50 to 82. We found that most older women (85%) considered their marriages to be fair and equitable. Older women were less concerned about existing inequities than their younger peers. Nonetheless, they were somewhat concerned with how rewarding and how fair and equitable their relationships were perceived to be. Those who felt over-benefited, for example, felt more guilty than did their less advantaged peers; those who felt under-benefited felt far more angry than did their privileged peers. Stressful life events—such as the arrival of children, retirement, serious illness, or the awareness impending death—often brought to awareness long simmering resentments over issues of fairness.     

Infrastructures of immobility: enabling international distance education students in Africa to not move

ABSTRACT

There is now a large literature discussing how mobilities are part of contemporary everyday power geometries and is a resource to which people have unequal access. This body of work has, thus, valorised mobility as a desirable good. Why some people choose immobility and what has to be mobilised to enable this immobility has received much less attention. This paper draws on interviews with international distance education students in Namibia and Zimbabwe studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA) to explore the spatio-temporal underpinnings to why students choose to remain at home while studying abroad and how this is arranged. It outlines the infrastructures of reach that enable student immobility and how their incomplete nature means that students have to rely on extensive systems of mobilities of other people and objects to ensure that their study progresses without their own educational mobility. In doing so we move away from considering immobility as a result of limited access to mobility. Instead, we set out a new research agenda on why and how the infrastructures of immobilities are important in mobility research.     

The Values Adolescents Aspire to,Their Well-being and the Values Parents Aspire to for Their Children

This paper presents a study of the relationship between the psychological well-being of Spanish adolescents from 12 to 16 years old and the values they aspire to for the future (N = 1,618). Adolescents’ well-being is explored through (a) their satisfaction with 19 specific life domains, (b) the Personal Well-Being Index (Cummins, Social Indicators Research, 43, 307−334, 1998) and (c) an item on overall satisfaction with life. The values they aspire to are explored by means of a list of 23 personal qualities or values. Satisfaction domains and values aspired to have been grouped into dimensions using principal component analysis (PCA). Boys scored significantly higher on the materialistic values dimension and the capacities and knowledge related values dimension, while girls scored higher on the interpersonal relationship related values dimension. The youngest adolescents scored higher on materialistic values, while the oldest scored higher on interpersonal relationships related values. Such results are similar to those obtained in a previous study, using a shorter version of the lists of satisfaction domains and of values aspired to and a sample of 8,995 adolescents and 4,381 of their parents from five different countries. In both studies results suggest that values aspired to can be considered a well-being related construct. However, an important change appears in the latest Spanish sample: Family values no longer fit with the interpersonal relationships related values dimension in the PCA, and now function as a separate value dimension which shows no correlation with overall life satisfaction, the PWI, or life satisfaction domains with the exception of family satisfaction. Interestingly, family values have also changed their loading dimension in the PCA developed with the answers from a sample of parents about the values they aspire to for their own child’s future (N = 723). Parents’ responses were compared with those of their own child, with concordances observed in about half of the families, low discrepancies in about one third and high or very high discrepancies in about 20%. Although the results of this study have their limitations, they suggest support for the hypothesis that important changes in values aspired to may be taking place over a short period of time, consistent with the findings of changes in values in several countries (Inglehart, Modernization and postmodernization. Cultural, economic and political change in 43 societies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), but apparently with no outstanding impact on adolescents’ well-being.     

Can We Compare Life Satisfaction Between Nationalities? Evaluating Actual and Imagined Situations

Do differences in reported life satisfaction between societies reflect real differences or do they reflect cultural differences in the way people rate their experiences? Study 1 showed that imagining better or worse life situations affected student respondents’ ratings of their own life satisfaction, as predicted by range–frequency theory. Study 2 investigated how German and Polish students rated their actual life satisfaction and how satisfied they would be under three imagined scenarios. Study 3 similarly compared Danish and Hungarian students. Both studies found significant differences in the rating of the hypothetical situations, and moderate correlations between ratings of satisfaction in the hypothetical situations and reality, but in neither study were national differences in actual satisfaction predicted by differences in hypothetical satisfaction. Overall, the results suggest that national differences in rated life satisfaction are real rather than reflecting differences in how satisfaction is rated.     

Active Participation and Well-Being Among the Elderly in Belgium and the USA: A Cross-National Time-Use Perspective

Active participation of the elderly is a recognized response to address the societal and individual challenges of rising life expectancy such as releasing the pressure of age-related public spending, reducing social isolation and improving well-being. How much time older people devote to active participation and whether their time allocation is associated with well-being remains under-investigated. Using time-use data from Belgium (n?=?1384) and the USA (n?=?2133), we investigate the time older people (65–80 years) spent on active participation and examine how this relates to their life satisfaction as an indicator of well-being. The countries vary in the amount of time spent on paid employment and volunteering, but not on informal help. Belgian older people spend much less time on paid employment than their American counterparts. This implies more are available to volunteer and provide informal help. Yet participation rates in these activities are higher in the USA. Multivariate analyses show that associations between active participation and life satisfaction vary between both countries and within both countries by gender and age. Overall, positive associations between paid work and volunteering and life satisfaction suggest that governments would do well to mobilize elderly into active participation, especially in Belgium. Negative associations between informal help and life satisfaction suggest governments should provide greater support for informal carers.

     

Ways by which Comparable Income Affects Life Satisfaction in Hong Kong

Proponents of social equality attribute low life satisfaction to income inequality in society, an inequality which occurs when most people have relatively low income and only a few have high income. In contrast, range-frequency theory and other social comparison theories predict that when most people have low income, they are satisfied because of the absence of relative deprivation among themselves. This prediction essentially suggests that that the size of the group of individuals with comparable income (i.e., income parity) sustains their life satisfaction. This theoretical prediction, however, does not consider their desire to be distinctive. By incorporating the notion of optimal distinctiveness, the size of income parity may have a quadratic effect on the individual’s life satisfaction. This is a hypothesis that receives support from the present study in Hong Kong, China. The study finds a saddle point of income parity size associated with the lowest life satisfaction, other things being equal. Furthermore, middle-income individuals have income parity size equal to or above this saddle point. They would have higher life satisfaction with increased income parity size, which therefore leads to a more enlarged income inequality. Others, however, may have higher life satisfaction with reduced income parity size. Hence, reducing income inequality would have mixed effects on people with different levels of income.

The Role of Housing Space in Determining Freedom and Flourishing in Older People

This paper takes as its central thesis Martha Nussbaum’s normative proposition that social arrangements should be evaluated primarily according to the extent of freedom people have to promote or achieve functionings they value. Using this as a lens the paper explores the housing circumstances of older people in the UK. The paper makes three points. Firstly, given that people use their homes to structure and manage their lives, the design, quality and standard of their home is therefore a critical factor in determining their “doings and beings” [Sen: 1992, Inequality Re-examined (Clarendon Press, Oxford) p. 40]. Since older people are more likely to spend greater time within the home through lower income, lessening mobility or loss of companions, this may be of greater significance to them than other age groups. Secondly the paper argues that the design of “specialist” dwellings for older people where there is a shifting balance between housing and care has played a part in shaping the thinking about the position and status of older people as well as providing a material context in which older people live [Laws: 1994, Environment and Planning A 26: pp. 1787–1802]. This paper suggests that this context may alter or deny many aspects of life that may be meaningful to individuals and therefore may inhibit rather than promote human flourishing. The paper draws mainly on a small qualitative study in which older people spoke of their home and its meaning. Quotations from this work are given in italics.     

Close Companion Friends,Self-Expression,and Psychological Well-Being in Late Life

This study has two central aims. Both are associated with self-expression, which is defined as the ability to fully utilize one’s own talents and abilities. The first goal is to see if self-expression reduces depressive symptoms over time whereas the second aim is to see whether close companion friends help older people more fully utilize their talents and abilities. Data from a nationwide longitudinal survey of older people in the United States suggest that older people who are able to find an outlet for their talents and abilities experience fewer symptoms of depression over time than older adults who do not feel they have been able to use their talents and abilities. The findings further reveal that older people who have a good relationship with a close companion friend are more likely to experience higher levels of self-expression.     

Financial Satisfaction in Old Age: A Satisfaction Paradox or a Result of Accumulated Wealth?

Prior research consistently has found that older adults, despite low incomes, are more financially satisfied than younger adults. This “satisfaction paradox” is typically attributed to elders’ supposed psychological accommodation to poor financial circumstances. We advance a different explanation, one that focuses on substantial age differences in wealth and liabilities. Data are from the first wave of the Norwegian NorLAG study (n = 4,169). Findings support the hypothesis that an examination of a wider range of economic variables shows that material circumstances are more important to the financial satisfaction of the elderly than previously believed. A considerable part of the higher financial satisfaction with increasing age can thus be explained by greater assets and less debt among the aged. Nonetheless, assets and debt do not mediate this relationship at lower incomes, because older people with little income have very little accumulated wealth. As older people with little income and wealth have a much stronger tendency to be financially satisfied than their younger, equally poor counterparts, an “aging paradox” still remains in this field.     

城市低保措施满意率的影响因素分析

中国城市居民最低生活保障制度作为社会最后一道"安全网",为社会的稳定发挥了举足轻重的作用。政府为低保政策做出了巨大的努力,但是仍有低保对象对低保措施不满意。为提高低保措施的满意率、增强低保制度的实施效果,本文对影响城市低保措施满意率的因素进行探讨分析。研究采用系统和整群抽样方法对徐州市445名低保对象进行入户调查,调查内容包括一般情况和症状自评量表(SCL-90)。结果显示影响城市低保措施满意率的因素是对生活质量、自身潜在价值的期望值和强大的生存压力。