Perspective Canada as a social report

This paper reviews the first attempt at social reporting in Canada, Perspective Canada, contrasting it with social reports from other nations, in particular the United States' publication, Social Indicators, 1973. Some future directions and structure for Perspective Canada are suggested, and the paper concludes with a discussion of the importance of the bold use of model building in the analysis of social indicators data, and the innovative use of graphical methods for social reporting.     

Social Monitoring and Reporting: A Success Story in Applied Research on Social Indicators and Quality of Life

From its beginnings research on social indicators was not primarily considered as pure, but rather applied research in terms of the regular monitoring of and reporting on quality of life. Thus, the successes—but eventually also failures—of social indicators research may first of all be visible in its most important field of application. Social monitoring and reporting activities, which can be traced back to the early 1970s provide quantitative information and empirically based analytical knowledge on well-being and progress in a single society or groups of societies to be used for different purposes, including policy making. Providing an overview over the variety of social monitoring and reporting projects emerging from social indicators research is supposed to be important with a view to form a more solid fundament for present and future discourses and initiatives in the field of measuring and monitoring well-being and progress. The article looks back to this field of applied social indicators research and—with a focus on Europe—identifies patterns and recent trends in this sort of activities. By looking forward, it finally discusses selected issues that are considered to be crucial for further improvements in this field.     

Quality of life in a European Perspective: The EUROMODULE as a New Instrument for Comparative Welfare Research

In this article, a new survey instrument for comparative welfare researchand social reporting is described, the EUROMODULE. It has been set up inintensive discussions among experts from several nations engaged inquality of life research and social reporting. By combining indicatorsof objective living conditions, subjective well-being, and quality ofsociety, with this new survey central aspects of the quality of life ofEuropean citizens can be investigated. The EUROMODULE initiative aimsat strengthening efforts to monitor and systematically analyze thecurrent state and the changes in living conditions and quality of lifein Europe in a comparative perspective. So far, data for eightEuropean countries are available.     

European Scientific Socio-Economic Reporting: State and Possibilities of Development

This paper proposes a European socio-economic reporting system, consisting of different elements and constructed in a modular form. The main idea is to monitor the process of welfare production, conceived in the form of an input-throughput-output model. Actors of welfare production generate inputs, these are mediated and filtered by institutional arrangements and finally determine the outcomes, that is the individual welfare. For all of the three parts of the welfare production model available data sources, social reports, social surveys, databases with institutional information etc. are reviewed and analyzed with respect to their use for the monitoring of welfare production. The paper is divided into five sections: first, the state of socio-economic reporting is outlined; second, the use of the available material is discussed; third, new approaches and instruments in socio-economic reporting are described; fourth, a scenario of European socio-economic reporting is outlined; and fifth, the steps needed for implementation are delineated.     

“Even If She Learns,She Doesn’t Understand Properly”. Children’s Understandings of Illbeing and Poverty in Five Ethiopian Communities

The paper argues on the basis of data from Young Lives, an international study of childhood poverty, and an extensive review of child-centered poverty studies that experiences of relative poverty and social exclusion are as common and corrosive in contemporary Ethiopia as North America and Europe. If taken seriously, this insight could broaden the focus of child poverty reduction from nutrition and education to include the psychosocial costs of lacking the culturally-specific resources required for full participation in society. The paper makes a number of methodological points of value to researchers undertaking similar studies: firstly, poverty can be explored by asking about illbeing; secondly, children’s conceptions of poverty are profoundly social and context-specific; and thirdly, young children are just as able to address these themes as older ones.     

Parenthood and Quality of Life in Old Age: The Role of Individual Resources,the Welfare State and the Economy

Although the notion of ‘Social Europe’ can refer to different principles and policy options, most research narrows down attitudes towards Social Europe to a unidimensional construct. In this study, we instead propose a multi-dimensional approach, and contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we elaborate the notion of ‘Social Europe’ conceptually, and distinguish between the decision-making level for social policy, European social citizenship, harmonization, member-state solidarity and interpersonal solidarity. Second, analysing the 2014 Belgian National Election Study by means of confirmatory factor analysis we evidence that citizens indeed have distinct attitudes towards the policy principles and instruments of Social Europe. Although these attitudinal dimensions are interrelated, they cannot be reduced to a single Social Europe factor, meaning that citizens differentiate in their attitudes between various aspects of Social Europe. In addition, our research indicates that member-state solidarity is the primary aspect of Social Europe in public opinion, whereas the feature that has received most scholarly attention in empirical research to date—the preferred decision-making level for social policy—cannot be considered as a key component of attitudes towards Social Europe. Third, we investigate whether citizens with different educational levels conceptualize Social Europe similarly using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. Results indicate that the attitudinal factor structure of Social Europe is largely equivalent among lower and higher-educated citizens.     

Children’s conceptualisation(s) of their well-being

This paper describes the process and some findings of a collaborative project between the New South Wales Commission for Children and Young People and researchers at the Social Justice and Social Change Research Centre, at the University of Western Sydney. The project was designed to inform the Commission in implementing its legislative mandate to develop a set of well-being indicators to monitor children's well-being over time. Placing children centrally as research participants was fundamental to the methodological approach of the project in which children's understandings of what contributes to their well-being were explored through qualitative methods. We discuss the epistemological and methodological approaches used in the project, in the context of other, earlier research towards the development of children's well-being indicators. Some of the early findings from the collaborative project are outlined and an example given of the way in which knowledge produced by a research approach which places children centrally, differs from and is similar to knowledge produced by more traditional child social indicator research. The paper ends with a discussion of some of the implications and challenges posed by reflecting on the research process and early findings from the research.     

Soziale Klasse in der Arbeitssoziologie. Zur Relevanz eines totgesagten Begriffs

Social class as analytical term has a longstanding tradition in sociology. Starting with Karl Marx and Max Weber international class analysis has developed heterogenous theoretical and empirical approaches. The paper outlines trends in the usage of social class in industrial sociology and the sociology of work in German-speaking countries from the after-war period to the paradigmatic shift heralded by Becks individualization thesis. The displacement of social class is interpreted as manifestation of symbolic struggles over the legitimate view of social reality, which has created considerable blind spots in the analysis of social inequalities. With reference to recent international developments in class research Pierre Bourdieu’s approach is used to explore ways to connect current subject-orientated approaches with questions of social class. Focussing on the class formation of subjectivity draws attention to the development of different orientations towards work and the dealing with the exigencies of work.     

Rethinking national social reports

Social reporting and social indicators are examined from the point of view of two specific cases, Social Indicators 1976 and Perspective Canada II.     

Projections of households and household populations by household size propensities

This paper describes a method for constructing projections of numbers of households of various types and the numbers of people in that structure. The method uses the concept ofhousehold size propensity, that is the probability that a person of given age and sex resides in a household of sizea, c, wherea is the number of adults per household andc is number of children per household. Using data from the 1981 and 1986 Censuses and population projections to the year 2011, the method produces projections of Australian households and household populations by size of household for five-year intervals from 1991 to 2011. The research reported in this paper arose out of the University of Melbourne’s research program to study the structure, economics and technology of households. This research began in 1986 at the Centre for Applied Research on the Future in the Department of Architecture and Building and from 1991 has been continued by the Households Research Unit in the Department of Economics. Reports of this work are contained in the collection of essaysHouseholds Work edited by Ironmonger (1989) and in discussion papers issued by the Centre for Applied Research on the Future by Ironmonger (1987), Jennings (1989) Sonius (1989) and Ironmonger and Richardson (1991). The authors wish to thank Roger Jones of the Social Sciences Data Archive for running some cross tabulations on the 1981 Census one per cent sample tape, Vic Jennings of the Households Research Unit for his valuable contributions in a number of discussions, and the referees to thisJournal for numerous helpful suggestions.     

Development challenges and opportunities confronting economies in transition

“Economies in Transition” (hereafter EIT or EITs) are countries in the process of shifting from “command” to “more open”, liberalized, free market economic systems. In addition to achieving major structural adjustments to their economies, the transformational process requires the introduction of a high degree of transparency in both the economic and political spheres of society. The transfer of state assets to private ownership is one part of the process as well, as is the creation or opening of “political space” that permits the emergence of private enterprise, multiparty political systems, and the introduction of a broad range of non-governmental organizations that carry out missions and functions which people themselves prefer to perform. Thus, the process of economic transformation requires a major socio-political-economic paradigm shift...one that places people and their needs at the center of the transformational process. The process is extremely difficult to achieve and is fraught with many dangers for countries that enter into it without substantial guidance from more economically advanced countries. This paper reports on the social development successes and failures of 31 economies in transition over the 15-year period 1990–2005. Included in the analysis are EITs located in East and South East Asia (N = 5), Central and Eastern Europe (N = 10), all 12 members of the Commonwealth of Independent States including the Russian Federation (N = 12), Turkey (N = 1), and the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (N = 3). Using the author’s extensively pre-tested Weighted Index of Social Progress (WISP), the paper reports data at three levels of analysis: (1) WISP performances for all 31 EITs-as-a-group; (2) sub-regional performances on the WISP and its component sub-indexes for each of the six EIT sub-regions included in the analysis; and (3) country-specific performances on the WISP for each of the 31 countries included in the analysis. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 International Symposium and Lecture Series on Social Policy sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and held on the campus of Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, 24–27 August, 2006.     

A note on suicide in Russia, 1965–1993

Recently, theCentre for Demography and Human Ecology in Moscow in collaboration with theInstitut National d’études Démographiques in Paris undertook a reconstruction of registered deaths in individual republics of the former Soviet Union. The first set of such data, tabulated by sex, age and cause of death, covers the deaths registered in Russia between 1965 and 1993. The present article extracts from the data set information on registered suicide mortality and reviews its trends and age and sex patterns. The link between alcoholism and suicide is strongly suggested.     

Stability and change in levels and structure of subjective well-being: USA 1972 and 1988

It has long been recognized that more needs to be known about the dynamic behavior of measures of subjective well-being. As the Social Indicators Movement matures, it becomes possible to explore issues of stability and change in measures of perceived life quality. To contribute to this research need, this paper reports results of administering similar measures of subjective well-being to several representative samples of the adult American population assessed 16 years apart — in 1972 and in 1988. Results show that in the United States, which has experienced reasonably continuous economic prosperity and no major social disruptions during these 16 years, thestructure of the subjective well-being measures (i.e. how they relate to one another and how concern-level measures predict global-level measures) has remained remarkably constant. This is in accord with expectation and enhances confidence in the validity and usefulness of the measures. Changes were found in thelevels of some of the measures: For the total population, feelings about life-as-a-whole, oneself, and one's own health became notably more positive; evaluations of own income and the national government also gained; but assessments of one's own family life, social relationships, community, and job remained fairly stable. Some of these gross changes were general throughout the population, but others occurred only for certain age, racial, or socioeconomic groups. Younger cohorts and people with higher educations and incomes showed more gains in subjective well-being than other groups.     

Measuring Social Cohesion: An Experiment using the Canadian National Survey of Giving,Volunteering, and Participating

Social cohesion is a concept difficult to define and to measure. As there can be many definitions, so there can be many measurements. The main problem, either in defining or measuring the concept, is its multilevel and multidimensional nature. At one extreme, country is the most commonly used level to view social cohesion but measurement at this level is of little use for any interventions. At the other extreme, community is the most useful level but it is a social construct for which data are difficult to get, given the administrative boundaries used in social surveys. As an initial attempt to measure social cohesion at a subcountry level, this study focuses on census metropolitan areas for which data on several dimensions of social cohesion are available. We use the information gathered by the National Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating (NSGVP) on three dimensions of social cohesion: political (voting and volunteering), economic (occupation, income, labour force participation) and social (social interactions, informal volunteering). Using statistical techniques including factor analysis and standardization, we create an overall index of social cohesion for each CMA. We point out use of this measure for further analysis of social dynamics.     

Two perspectives on sustainable development

This paper applies the Perspectivist conception to the issue of sustainable development in such a way as to make perspicuous two competing views on the issue. These views, here termed theeconomic and theecological, are respectively that of the United Nation's Brundtland Commission, which favours economic growth as a means of overcoming the world's environmental problems, and an alternative view, according to which environmental problems must be dealt with directly, and economic growth may well be a hindrance to their solution. The paper concludes with a theory of human development based on thevicious circle principle, which shows theeconomic perspective on sustainable development to be incoherent, and theecological perspective to remain a viable alternative.This paper, here published with permission, is an expansion of Appendix VI of the author's book,Scientific Progress.Funding for research has been provided by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.     

Development Challenges of the "New Europe"

European nations are undergoing rapid and fundamental changesin response to social, political and economic eventsthat are occurring both within and outside the region.These changes are far-reaching in scope and,ultimately, are expected to result in a redefinitionof ``Europe' and what it means to be ``European.'Using the author's extensively pre-tested Index ofSocial Progress (ISP), the research reported in thispaper: 1) identifies the major changes in socialdevelopment that have taken place in 36 European nationssince 1970; 2) contrasts Europe's recent socialdevelopment trends with those of other major world regions(including Asia, Africa, Latin and North America, andOceania); 3) using aggregate scores on the WeightedIndex of Social Progress (WISP), identifies Europe's``social leaders' (SLs), ``middle performing countries'(MPCs), identifies Europe's ``social leaders' (SLs),``middle performing countries' (MPCs), and ``sociallyleast developing countries' (SLDCs); 4) identifies themajor development challenges confronting Europe at theoutset of a new decade; and 5) provides baseline dataagainst which future developments in the region maybe assessed.     

Which Inequality Makes People Dissatisfied with Their Lives? Evidence of the Link Between Life Satisfaction and Inequalities

This paper aims at establishing a clear link between different types of inequality and life satisfaction in Europe. We analyse the relationship between life satisfaction and both income inequality and inequality of opportunity using seven waves of the European Social Survey. The results show that in Europe both income inequality and inequality of opportunity reduce people’s life satisfaction. Our main results suggest that all socio-economic groups are dissatisfied with income inequality, whereas primarily low socio-economic individuals worry about inequality of opportunity. We find that expected mobility is very important in explaining the link between inequality and life satisfaction for all socio-economic groups in Europe. We advance the hypothesis that life satisfaction is conditioned by a mix of normative arguments against inequality and by the fear/possibility to lose/gain a good social position. This result complements findings on the mediating role of social mobility in the relationship with subjective well-being.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: Vaclav Smil, Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty‐First Century Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism Massimo Livi Bacci, The Population of Europe: A History Richard G. Rogers, Robert A. Hummer, and Charles B. Nam, Living and Dying in the USA: Behavioral, Health, and Social Differentials of Adult Mortality     

Quality of life indicators and health: Current status and emerging conceptions

Quality of life is an increasingly common theme in the health status and health promotion literatures. Six approaches that consider quality of life and health are reviewed. These are (a) health-related quality of life; (b) quality of life as social diagnosis in health promotion; (c) quality of life among persons with developmental disabilities; (d) quality of life as social indicators; (e) the Centre for Health Promotion (University of Toronto) model, and (f) Lindstrom's quality of life model. Each approach is considered as to its emphasis on objective or subjective indicators, individual or system-level measurement, value-laden or value-neutral assumptions, and potential relationship to social policy and social change goals. The links among the social indicators, quality of life, and health promotions areas are examined.