Development of Indicators for Family Well-Being in Malaysia

This study was carried out to develop a set of indicators for measuring and reporting the state of family well-being in Malaysia, and subsequently, to produce an Index of Family Well-Being. To build the set of indicators, domains of family well-being and relevant indicators were identified from past studies. Focus group discussions with families, professional groups and NGOs helped to refine the indicators prior to the main study. Using a stratified random sampling design, 2,808 households were identified (a parent and a child aged at least 13 years), making a total sample of 5,616 respondents. Results indicated ten key indicators that can predict family well-being—resiliency, safety, savings, healthy lifestyle, time with family, work-family balance, importance of religion, number of bedrooms at home, debt and child care—supporting the notion of family well-being being multi-dimensional and interconnected. On the basis of the results, a model of family well-being was hypothesized. This model was used to guide the development of the Index of Family Well-being. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was carried out to determine the fit of the model to data. Five domains of family well-being were identified—family relationships, economic situation, health and safety, community relationship and religion/spirituality. The Index of Family Well-Being was calculated using the equal weighting strategy to each of these five domains. This index showed that the current family well-being of Malaysians is relatively high at 7.95 (SD = 1.38) on a 0–10 Likert response format. The findings suggest that family well-being is multifaceted, made up not only of the immediate family relationships and health and safety of its members, but include having adequate income to meet the demands of a minimum standard of living. Currently, the Index that is developed is only in the form of a numerical value reflecting the state of family well-being, but in future, it can be used to track changes in the family from time to time.     

The Multiple Uses of Subjective Well-Being Indicators

There are barriers to the significant use of subjective well-being indicators in policy making. These barriers can be overcome, but this will take a co-ordinated effort. These indicators can play multiple roles. They can stimulate public debate, inform the development of formal or informal economic models, influence the choice of other indicators more directly related to policy outcomes, draw attention to important issues which might otherwise be ignored, input into a new form of cost benefit analysis, be used in before and after appraisal, and be used by the public to hold politicians to account. Subjective indicators are better placed to play these roles than either dashboards or indexes based on objective indicators. It is not clear whether they will play these roles and two scenarios are possible. In the first, the relatively marginal role the indicators are beginning to play in policy will be expand, but they will not move centre stage, or in any way challenge existing headline indicators such as gross domestic product. In the second, a set of tools is developed which politicians and journalists find useful, both for communicating and for developing their ideas. In this scenario, the ideas implicit in subjective well-being indicators find their way into public debate and thus drive policy change. As a result they do challenge existing headline indicators.     

Housing Well-Being: Developing and Validating a Measure

Housing well-being refers to the home resident’s cumulative positive and negative affect associated with the purchase, preparation, ownership, use, and maintenance of the current home, and the selling of the previous home. Housing well-being is assumed to occur when the home is bought with the least amount of effort (purchase), the home is prepared for use to meet the needs of the new occupants (preparation), ownership signals status and enhances the home owner’s financial portfolio (ownership), the home serves the housing needs of the residents (use), the maintenance, renovation, and repair in the home are minimal, least costly, and effortless (maintenance), and the sale of the home is transacted with the least amount of effort and most financial gain (selling). Based on this conceptualization of housing well-being, we conducted an exploratory study to identify the sources of satisfaction related to the purchase, preparation, ownership, use, and maintenance of the current home, and the selling of the previous home. The exploratory study also helped us articulate a theoretical model describing the interrelationships among the housing well-being constructs and their consequence: the perceived quality-of-life (QOL) impact of the home. The exploratory study helped us also to develop survey measures, which in turn were validated through two additional studies involving surveys of home owners in the US and Korea.     

Developing a Concept of Workplace Well-Being for Greater China

The aim of this paper is to construct a notion of well-being in the workplace applicable to Taiwan society as an example of the Chinese cultural communities. The construction involves the following steps. Different domains of the well-being in the workplace are identified based on the results of workplace research. A set of integrative values combining universal values and Chinese values is constructed to serve as the ground for constructing the components of workplace well-being. Both the universal portion and the Chinese portion have a generic and a workplace-specific portion as their integrative parts. The values in effect help to define specific contents of the components, thus making them relevant and applicable to the Chinese culture. The construct serves as the basis to develop specific indicators to measure, monitor and assess well-being in the workplace. The construct of workplace well-being forms a part of the general well-being in business which contains various well-beings associated with the multiple stakeholders in the business communities—customers, shareholders, citizens, competitors, communities, and the environment. In today’s globalized business environment, this construct is especially significant when more multinationals are operating with an increasingly multicultural workplace where people with different cultures communicate, cooperate and interact.

Dynamic Well-Being: Connecting Indicators of what People Anticipate with Indicators of what they Experience

There are many indicators of a person’s well-being that could be used for policy purposes. Few would argue that any single indicator of well-being is appropriate in all contexts and, increasingly, social scientists are attempting to integrate the various indicators. Further successful integration depends on understanding how the various indicators of well-being relate to one another in a dynamic way. This paper attempts to connect indicators of what people anticipate to indicators of what is actually experienced and, in so doing, inform the normative debate about the appropriateness of different indicators in policy contexts.     

A Ecological Model of Well-Being in Child Welfare Referred Children

Despite its social, political and economic relevance, child well-being remains a challenging construct to define and measure accurately. This holds true especially for children growing up in at-risk families, where their development is hindered by many adverse circumstances. Typically, the well-being of child welfare (CW) referred children has been conceptualized as the absence of negative outcomes, and the study of its determinants has been limited to children’s micro-systems. In this study, we aimed to obtain a suitable indicator of child well-being and to test a model of the determinants of CW referred children’s well-being including parental, family and wider contextual variables. The sample included 249 parents and 46 case managers from Portuguese and Spanish CW services. A three-domain solution from selected items of the Child Well-Being Scales (Physical, Academic and Socioemotional) was tested and confirmed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results of structural equation modeling for each domain revealed that risk factors nested in the wider context and those related to material disadvantage were the most powerful predictors of physical well-being, while parenting and family functioning variables predicted better both academic and socio-emotional well-being. Our findings suggest that different risk and protective factors matter for different outcomes and that most of these factors are associated with each other. Therefore, interventions with at-risk children must take this specificity into account when targeting each domain of well-being, and efforts could be allocated to a few modifiable dimensions, which would in turn positively affect other parental and family factors.     

Measuring Progress and Well-Being: A Comparative Review of Indicators

We provide a new database sampling well-being and progress indicators implemented since the 1970s at all geographic scales. Starting from an empirical assessment, we describe and quantify trends in the institutional basis, methodology, and content of indicators which are intended to capture the broadest conceptions of human social progress. We pay special attention to the roles of sustainability and subjective well-being in these efforts, and find that certain types of indicators are more successful in terms of transparency, accountability, as well as longevity. Our taxonomy encompasses money-denominated accounts of “progress”, unaggregated collections of indicators, indices, and measures oriented around subjective well-being. We find that a most promising innovation is the indices whose weights are accountable to empirical data, in particular through models of subjective well-being. We conclude by amplifying others’ advocacy for the appropriate separation of current well-being from environmental indicators, and for the avoidance of aggregation except where it is meaningful.     

Child Well-Being in Advanced Economies in the Late 2000s

This paper aimed at comparing the well-being of children across the most economically advanced countries of the world while discussing the methodological issues involved in comparing children’s well-being across countries. A Child Well-being Index was constructed to rank countries according to their performance in advancing child well-being. The Index used 30 indicators combined into 13 components, again summarised in 5 dimensions for 29 rich countries. Data from various sources were combined to capture aspects of child well-being: material well-being, health, education, behaviour and risks, housing and environment. The scores for the countries on all variables and combinations of variables were discussed in detail. The Child Well-being Index revealed that the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries (excluding Denmark) did relatively better than the other countries while Romania and the United States performed well below the average. Overall, serious differences existed in child well-being across countries suggesting that in many, improvement could be made in the quality of children’s lives.     

Centrality and Dimensionality of 14 Indicators of Mental Well-Being in Four Countries: Developing an Integrative Framework to Guide Theorizing and Measurement

Social Indicators Research - The primary objective of this research is to develop an integrative framework for distinguishing and classifying well-being variables. Towards this end, rigorous...     

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.     

Subjective Well-Being and Social Capital in Belgian Communities. The Impact of Community Characteristics on Subjective Well-Being Indicators in Belgium

In this article, we investigate the effect of individual and community level characteristics on subjective well-being in Belgium. Various indicators for subjective well-being are being used in a multilevel analysis of the 2009 SCIF survey (n = 2,080) and the 2006 Belgian ESS sample (n = 1,798). On the individual level, most hypotheses on the determinants of subjective well-being were confirmed. Living with a partner and age were shown to have strong effects, but also social capital indicators had a significant positive effect on subjective well-being. All these effects remained significant controlling for optimism. On the community level, especially unemployment rate had a negative impact on subjective well-being. The analysis further demonstrates that in homogeneous regions, community characteristics have a far weaker impact on subjective well-being indicators than in economically more heterogeneous regions.     

Developing a Measure of Internet Well-Being: Nomological (Predictive) Validation

This paper reports on an effort to develop an Internet well-being measure for possible use by government agencies and industry associations that are directly involved with the promulgation of the Internet. Such measures can help officials gauge the social health of those Internet-related industries and institutional sectors, which in turn can guide the development of policies to enhance the quality-of-life impact of the Internet. The Internet well-being measure is based on the theoretical notion that the perception of the overall impact of the Internet on users of the Internet is determined by their perceptions of the impact of the Internet in their life domains such as consumer life, work life, leisure life, social life, community life, sensual life, among others. In turn, the perception of impact of the Internet in a given life domain (e.g., consumer life, work life) is determined by perceptions of benefits and costs of the Internet within that domain. We conducted a focus group to identify all the perceived benefits and costs within salient life domains of college students. We also conducted a thorough literature search to identify studies that examined the quality-of-life impact of the Internet in a variety of life domains. We then tested the nomological validity of the measure through two surveys at two major universities (one in the USA and the other in Korea). The statistical analysis allowed us to identify those measurement items that are most predictive, and therefore considered as nomologically valid. Policy implications of the study are discussed along with future research avenues.     

Developing a Measure of Community Well-Being Based on Perceptions of Impact in Various Life Domains

A new measure of community well-being is developed based on the notion that community residents perceive the quality-of-life (QOL) impact of community services and conditions in various life domains (e.g., family, social, leisure, health, financial, cultural, consumer, work, spiritual, and environmental domains). These perceptions influence residents’ overall perception of community well-being, their commitment to the community, and their overall life satisfaction. Survey data were collected in the Flint area (Michigan, USA) in four waves (1978, 1990, 2001, and 2006). The data supported the nomological validity of the measure.     

Child Mortality and Environment in Developing Countries

This paper studies child mortality and fertility in 61 developing countries including the Central Asian Republics (CARs). To control for simultaneity, an estimated value of fertility was used in the mortality equation and a final specification included only exogenous socio-economic, health and environmental variables. We confirm the importance of female literacy in explaining both fertility and mortality, and also find a measure of consumption for the poorest share of the population to be significant, while controlling for nutrition, health expenditure, and income distribution. Incidence of tuberculosis and female agricultural population proxy for environmental impacts, but in spite of these controls, approximately 41% additional mortality was estimated due to living in the CARs. The results fill gaps in the literature: we use a wider range of socio-economic and environmental health variables than previously in an encompassing analysis of mortality and fertility, and find evidence of excessive mortality in the CARs most likely linked to environmental degradation in the region.

The Role of Family Policy in Explaining the International Variation in Child Subjective Well-Being

The article proposes an innovative analyse for cross-national differences in the subjective child well-being introducing new indicators and measures. This dimension addresses the issue of welfare support to parents and child early education. The question of this research is to what extend family policies can explain the variability of subjective child well-being components in different European countries. Based on this question, the two objective of this proposal are: (1) to review the existing literature with respect to conceptualization, measurement, and correlates of children’s subjective well-being, with a special emphasis on the context of family policies and family well-being in different European welfare states, and (2) to analyse the relation between these policies and subjective child well-being. In order to get these aims we have elaborated two indexes: the index of child subjective well-being and family policy index. Data for HBSC (Health Behaviour in School-aged Children) for the first index and data from OECD Family Database is used to build these indicators. We found that the index of child subjective well-being is comparatively higher in those countries where family policies are more generous in the areas of preschool education, family services, family spending and duration of paid parental leave.     

Towards the Use of Crowdsourced GIS Data to Georeference Child Well-Being Globally

Child well-being is described as a social problem, such that in most cases social indicators defined by experts are used, without much input from local and heterogeneous communities. This article makes the case for an innovative way to monitor and explore child well-being globally, while also critiquing currently used indices. Based on Nussbaum’s Capabilities approach, we propose to formulate indices by using GIS and a comprehensive list of relevant geospatial datasets, using uniquely designed meta-layers and feature catalogues. Moreover, we argue that these geospatial data can be collected and mapped by the local communities, through participatory approaches, thus not relying on authoritative engagement and data. This will contribute to the empowerment of communities, making them relevant stakeholders with valued contribution to the process. This paper outlines preliminary work related to concepts and ideas, whereas future work is planned to develop an elaborate and comprehensive GIS model, and conduct further spatial analysis in the framework of a small scale campaign.     

Productivity Indicators for the Rural Poor in Developing Countries

Meeting the Millennium Development Goals will necessarily require a heavy focus on rural areas, where most of the world’s poor are to be found. More specifically, policy will need to raise the productivity of this group, which includes farmers, wage labourers and those suffering from disease and malnutrition. Yet, at present, no index exists which can assess countries on the basis of technological indicators that bear heavily on the productivity of the rural poor. A wide variety of unresolved problems notwithstanding, this paper constitutes the first attempt to construct an index that is designed specifically to assist those who are concerned with rural-specific policies towards meeting the MDGs.     

Time in the Development of Indicators on Sustainable Wellbeing: A Local Experiment in Developing Alternative Indicators

This paper is a theoretical and methodological study on the topics of distribution of and competition between time spans dedicated to social activities in the development of sustainable well-being indicators. This article seeks to answer the following question: why and how should we take into account social time in the development of alternative indicators? To bring to light the complex relationship between well-being, sustainability and people’s relationship to time, this article draws on an experiment aimed at developing Regional Sustainable Well-being Indicators (Indicateurs de Bien-être Soutenable Territorialisés—IBEST), which took place in the Grenoble urban area. This experiment was based on two methodologies; the first one being a quantitative survey, and the second one being a series of qualitative interviews coupled with a participatory approach. One of the datasheet indicators developed following this methodological crossover is the activity times balancing indicator, which allows us to take into consideration the pressure affecting time spent on social activities (work, leisure, families and civic engagement).     

Slum Residence and Child Health in Developing Countries

Continued population growth and increasing urbanization have led to the formation of large informal urban settlements in many developing countries in recent decades. The high prevalence of poverty, overcrowding, and poor sanitation observed in these settlements—commonly referred to as “slums”—suggests that slum residence constitutes a major health risk for children. In this article, we use data from 191 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) across 73 developing countries to investigate this concern empirically. Our results indicate that children in slums have better health outcomes than children living in rural areas yet fare worse than children in better-off neighborhoods of the same urban settlements. A large fraction of the observed health differences appears to be explained by pronounced differences in maternal education, household wealth, and access to health services across residential areas. After we control for these characteristics, children growing up in the slums and better-off neighborhoods of towns show levels of morbidity and mortality that are not statistically different from those of children living in rural areas. Compared with rural children, children living in cities (irrespective of slum or formal residence) fare better with respect to mortality and stunting but not with respect to recent illness episodes.