Child Well-being: A Systematic Review of the Literature

A systematic review the child well-beingliterature in English was conducted withsearches in five databases to assess thecurrent state of child well-being research andanswer the following questions: (1) How is childwell-being defined? (2) What are the domains ofchild well-being? (3) What are the indicators ofchild well-being? and (4) How is childwell-being measured? This review updates andexpands a previous review of the childwell-being literature spanning 1974–1992. Results indicate that well-being is a commonlyused but inconsistently defined term frequentlyincluded in the study of child development. There are five distinct domains of childwell-being: physical, psychological, cognitive,social, and economic. Positive indicators areused more often in the physical, cognitive,social, and economic domains, while morenegative or deficit indicators are used in thepsychological domain. There is littleagreement in the research literature on how tobest measure child well-being.

     

Production,Reproduction, and Education: Women,Children, and Work in a British Perspective

This article reviews findings of studies by the author and colleagues on relationships between women's work and the reproduction of the British population based on data for female birth cohorts 1922–70. The studies address three questions: (1) How do children affect women's paid work and lifetime earnings? (2) How does women's employment affect the quantity of children born? (3) How does women's employment affect the “quality” of children? The answers are affected by the woman's educational attainment. On question 1, childrearing may often halve lifetime earnings, but seldom for the well educated. By contrast, any effects from employment to childbearing are most apparent in the late motherhood of the well educated. Child quality, as assessed by indicators of child development, benefits from maternal education and suffers little from maternal employment. The economic advantages for children in dual‐career families are thus unabated. A widening gulf between mothers will tend to polarize the life chances of their children, unless there are more options to combine employment and childrearing, especially including good‐quality child care for those who cannot afford the market price. Education is a powerful influence, but does not alone solve all issues of equity, whether between families or between sexes.     

The Retirement Life Course in America at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century

As the baby boom cohorts expand the number of U.S. retirees, population estimates of the employment, withdrawal and reentry behaviors of older Americans’ remain scarce. How long do people work? How frequently is retirement reversed? How many years are people retired? What is the modal age of retirement? And, how do the patterns for women compare to those for men? Using the 1992–2004 Health and Retirement Study, we estimate multistate working life tables to update information on the age-graded regularities of the retirement life course of men and women in the United States. We find that at age 50 men can expect to spend half of their remaining lives working for pay, while women can expect to spend just one-third. Half of all men and women have left the labor force by ages 63 and 61, respectively. Although the majority of retirement exits are final, variation in the nature and duration of the retirement process is substantial, as about a third of men’s and women’s exits are reversed. By quantifying these patterns for men and women, we provide a sound empirical basis for evaluating policy designed to address the financial pressures population aging places on public and private pension systems.     

The Contribution of Scenic Beauty Indicators in Estimating Environmental Welfare Measures: A Case Study

Aesthetic indicators of landscapes, expressedas individual scenic beauty estimates, may beused as proxies of individuals' specificaesthetic values, and improve the properties ofwelfare estimates produced by contingentvaluation models. This work presents resultsfrom an interdisciplinary study where forestscenic beauty indicators are utilized in aneconomic valuation study approximating welfareestimates from increased forest fireprotection. The omission of scenic beautyindicators from the economic valuation ofenvironmental resources produces biased andoverestimated welfare measures. Combiningeconomic and environmental indicatorssignificantly improves the explanatory power ofeconomic valuation models and of the producedwelfare measures. Such a combination, however,is only possible when carried out byinterdisciplinary research teams. The resultsof such research are significant toenvironmental and natural resource policymakers and planners.     

Whatever Happened to Social Indicators in Africa? Whatever Happened Indeed! A Developing World Perspective on the Kenneth C. Land and Alex C. Michalos Report on ‘Fifty Years After the Social Indicators Movement’

Africa is a latecomer to the Social Indicators Movement. The first social indicators for Third World countries were developed by outsiders and covered almost exclusively topics related to basic needs and development. In response to Kenneth Land’s and Alex Michalos’ historical assessment and their agenda for future ‘social indicators/quality of life/well-being’ research, the commentary traces how South Africa and sub-Saharan countries—with a little help from many friends who are pioneers in the movement—have succeeded in developing their own home-grown social indicators movement. Addressing some of the themes outlined in the agenda that Land and Michalos set for future research, the commentary discusses the importance of monitoring social change occurring in African society in a ‘post-industrialized and much more globalized, and digitized-computerized-roboticized’ era: How will new values and norms impact on the quality of life of future generations of African people?     

Measuring living standards with proxy variables

Very few demographic surveys in developing countries have gathered information on household incomes or consumption expenditures. Researchers interested in living standards therefore have had little alternative but to rely on simple proxy indicators. The properties of these proxies have not been analyzed systematically. We ask what hypotheses can be tested using proxies, and compare these indicators with consumption expenditures per adult, our preferred measure of living standards. We find that the proxies employed in much demographic research are very weak predictors of consumption per adult. Nevertheless, hypothesis tests based on proxies are likely to be powerful enough to warrant consideration.     

A System of Sustainability Indicators for the Province of Thai Binh,Vietnam

Sustainable Development is a broad and universal concept. Indicators are a basis to measure sustainability and to direct policies that aim to achieve a better quality of life. Thai Binh, a coastal province in North Vietnam is strongly concerned about strategic sustainability development. To select a system of sustainability indicators, the Delphi method was applied in 2012. A two-round questionnaire was organized to use with 32 experts, who acted as participants. 69 indicators were selected from 98 listed indicators: 15 related to economic development, 5 to the sea and coastal zone, 1 to the global economic partnership, 4 to consumption and production patterns, 7 to poverty, 3 to governance, 9 to health, 4 to education, 3 to demographics, 2 to natural hazards, 5 to atmosphere, 7 to land, and 3 to freshwater. Conversely, 29 other indicators were rejected. The Delphi method allows indicator selection for identification of the process of sustainability. The system of indicators, as the first important step of the sustainable development process, provides useful information for decision makers and planners as well sustainability strategy. It is planned that the indicators selected should be applied in the province.     

Measuring and Analysing the Wellbeing of Australia’s Indigenous Population

According to most standard socioeconomic indicators (for example employment, income and education), Indigenous Australians tend to have worse outcomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Most objective health indicators including life expectancy also tend to be worse. Traditionally, these two domains and associated objective indicators have been the focus of research, government policy and evaluation. There has been less research, however, on differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in subjective measures of wellbeing. In this paper, I attempt to answer three related research questions on Indigenous wellbeing—What is the average level of emotional wellbeing and satisfaction with life for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population of Australia? How do the differences between the two populations change once other characteristics have been controlled for? What are the factors associated with emotional wellbeing within the Indigenous population? With regards to the first two questions, Indigenous Australians are less likely to report frequent periods of happiness and more likely to report periods of extreme sadness than the non-Indigenous population. Surprisingly, given these results for emotional wellbeing, a major finding from the analysis was that Indigenous Australians were significantly more likely to report above-average satisfaction with their life. The main finding with regards to the third question is that using retrospective measures, those in remote areas report higher levels of happiness than those in non-remote areas. This is different to the results for socioeconomic status and objective measures of health found elsewhere and has important implications for government policy in Australia.     

A Case for Developing Community Drug Indicators

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

Individual and couple intentions for more children: A research note

The question, “Do you and your husband intend to have a (another) child?” has become standard on fertility surveys. It is almost always asked of the wife, but is treated as the couple’s joint intention. How reasonable is such an assumption? Do husbands’ and wives’ reports of couple intent correspond closely? Do spouses know the fertility wishes of their partners? Do they take these wishes into account when reporting couple intent? Analysis of a sample of fecund, white, urban U.S. couples shows each question answered affirmatively. Reports from either spouse appear to be good, although admittedly imperfect, indicators of couple intent.     

人口因素在北京市水资源压力中的驱动作用分析

文章在对北京市水资源压力变动趋势进行分析的基础上,进一步使用对数平均的因素分解法对北京市2001～2010年间的用水量进行各类驱动因素的分析,研究人口规模变化、家庭规模和数量等人口学因素在各种驱动因素中的地位和作用。结果表明,北京市水资源压力很大,而且近年来呈现持续上升、逐年加剧的趋势;北京市用水量增长最大的驱动因素是人均GDP的增长;人口数量、家庭数量以及家庭规模等人口学要素对用水量变化有一定的作用,但并非是北京市用水量变化的最主要因素;提高生产部门的水资源利用率,引导居民树立合理的消费观对缓解北京市水资源压力、提高人口承载力有重要意义。     

Deprivation index for small areas in Spain

The term deprivation is often used to refer to economic or social shortages in a given geographical area. This concept of deprivation has been identified for years using simple indicators such as income level, education and social class. One of the advantages of using simple indicators is the availability of data, since they come directly from sources of information like censuses and population registers. However, the main disadvantage of these indicators is their limited usefulness when measuring a concept as complex as deprivation with a single variable. One possible solution to this problem is using compound indices, made up of a combination of simple indicators. For years, the concept of material deprivation in Spain has been measured using indices or indicators imported from other countries. However, there are no studies that investigate if all of these variables are really related to material deprivation in Spain. In this context, the objective of this study is to create a synthetic index for material deprivation for the municipalities in Spain, bearing in mind the variables available from the Population and Housing Census. The index was built on a principal components factor analysis. The analysis showed two factors. The first factor showed a high positive correlation to the variables relating to illiteracy rate, unemployment rate and percentage of manual labourers, while the second factor was seen as highly positively correlated to the variables relating to the percentage of homes without access to a vehicle and the dependency index and also correlated, though negatively, to the percentage of foreigners between 16 and 49 who lived abroad in 1991. The variables that make up the first factor can be considered to be an approximation of the concept of deprivation in Spain. This study proposes a deprivation index made up of three simple indicators available from national information sources: percentage of illiteracy, percentage of unemployment and percentage of manual labourers. With this index, the criteria for measuring deprivation in Spanish municipalities can be unified and a comparison of the results of the different studies in our context facilitated.     

Prek?rer Wohlstand und nachhaltiger Konsum

The article addresses a question that so far has been neglected in environmental sociology: How do social vulnerabilities and precarious situations affect opportunities for sustainable consumption? Firstly, I will show that both the sociology of inequality and environmental sociology have hardly made any systematic attempt to clarify the relation between the physical environment and social inequality. Subsequently, I will distinguish different dimensions in the physical use of the environment and ask whether and to what extent they are relevant to social inequality. I will then demonstrate that private households are the appropriate focus of research for a promising sociology of inequality approach to the distributive issues involved in using the environment. Finally, I propose that environmental research on sustainable consumption pay greater attention to the findings from recent research on precarization.     

Big Data and Social Indicators: Actual Trends and New Perspectives

Big Data are a top subject in international research articles and a vast debate is taking place on their actual capability of being used to complement or even substitute official statistics surveys and social indicators in particular. In this paper we analyse the metadata of the Scopus database of academic articles on Big Data and we show that most of the existing and intensively growing literature is focused on software and computational issues whilst articles that are specifically focused on statistical issues and on the procedures to build social indicators from Big Data are a much smaller share of this vast production. Nevertheless the works that focus on these topics show promising results because in developed countries Big Data seem to be a good information base to create reliable proxies of social indicators, whereas in developing countries their use (for instance using satellite images) may be a viable alternative to traditional surveys. However, Big Data based social indicators deeply suffer of a number of open issues that affect their actual use: they do not correspond to any sampling scheme and they are often representative of particular segments of the population; they generally are private process-produced data whose access by national statistical offices is rarely possible although the intrinsic value of the information contained in Big Data has a social importance that should be shared with the whole community; Big Data lack the socio-economic background on which social indicators have been founded and their help to policy makers in their decision process is a fully open point. Therefore Big Data may be a big opportunity for the definition of traditional or new social indicators but their statistical reliability should be further investigated and their availability and use should be internationally coordinated.     

Comparing Social Behaviour Across Culture and Nations: The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ Questions

How is the cultural construct of individualism-collectivism relate to self-esteem? This is a complex and challenging proposition. Self-esteem (i.e., a person’s global, evaluative view of his/her self), has resisted unequivocal definition or clear operationalization. There is a substantial literature on self-esteem hypothesis which may be stated thus: self-concept and self-esteem play important roles in a person’s decisions to engage in certain behaviour. Due to inconsistent and indeterminate findings, business researchers and cross-cultural scholars, have failed to take into account possible interaction between culture/gender and social behaviour (self). Through analyses of variance, we provide evidence, that nationality yielded a highly significant levels of self-esteem with a distinctive statistically significant main and interaction effects. This result is robust to different benchmarks (for example, Hofstede’s cultural indicators) used to measure self-esteem. The results are consistent with previous research, the cross-cultural stability of the measure makes it a potentially useful tool for evaluating the nature of self-conception across cultures. Caveats and implications are discussed.     

Household structure and child nutrition: A reinterpretation of income and mother's education

Two frequently used predictors of child malnutrition are family income and mother's education. Despite their common sense rationale, they pose difficult and perhaps intractable problems of measurement and conceptualization. This paper proposes to substitute the concepts of family and maternal differentiation for these traditionally used indicators. Differentiation is defined as the capacity of the individual or group to process a diversity of information categories. Using data from a recent survey of households in Panama, indicators of this concept were constructed at the family and at the maternal levels using principal component analysis. These are shown to predict a range of indicators of childrens' nutritional status when appropriate control variables are included in the regression analysis. The same analysis was then repeated with income and mother's education replacing the differentiation measures. The results support our claim that the differentiation indicators are superior, and we argue that an even more important reason for using them is that they open the door to a long-term research program that is theoretically consistent and potentially cumulative.     

Satisfied and dissatisfied South Africans: results from the General Household Survey in international comparison

Who are the satisfied South Africans 10 years into democracy? How do material factors contribute to their life satisfaction? These are the questions addressed in this paper. Earlier South African research has consistently found a close positive relationship between life satisfaction and material standards of living in the apartheid and post-apartheid era. Recently, a new source of information has become available to shed further light on the association between material and subjective well-being. In 2002, Statistics South Africa, the country’s official source of statistical information, agreed to ask South Africans participating in the General Household Survey whether they were satisfied or dissatisfied with life. The 2002 General Household Survey (n26’000) used a measure developed for the Euromodule that allows for international comparison. The wide-ranging information contained in South Africa’s official?household survey offers a unique opportunity to explore what makes for satisfied and dissatisfied South Africans in relation to their material living standards. Results indicate that the improved living standards afforded to many black South Africans under democracy are associated with increases in life satisfaction. Furthermore, habituation does not appear to have diluted the positive relationship between living standards and well-being. However, political factors continue to play an important role in shaping subjective well-being. In conclusion, it is argued that material gains might also have restored the pride and dignity denied to black South Africans in the past.     

An Indigenous Knowledges Perspective on Valid Meaning Making: A Commentary on Research with the EDI and Aboriginal Communities

Offering an Indigenous perspective, this commentary discusses collaborative research, shared meaning making, and knowledge building specific to child development, and reflects on social, cultural, and historical aspects that influence these processes. Drawing upon experiences of developing a collaborative research approach with which to engage Aboriginal communities to appreciate, understand, and potentially use the Early Development Instrument (EDI; Janus and Offord in Can J Behav Sci 39:1–22, 2007), a teacher-administered rating scale on kindergarten children’s development, the commentary focuses on five key questions relevant to research processes undertaken with Indigenous Peoples, and the importance of social, ethical, and cultural aspects of validity: How do Indigenous epistemologies and knowledges inform and influence research processes that utilize the EDI as a measurement tool? How can the EDI be used as a measurement tool within a research process that fosters the thriving of children and their families in Aboriginal communities while promoting Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination? In what ways do local, Indigenous cultural and ethical considerations inform aspects of validation research pertaining to the EDI? How can (Western mainstream) universities build research capacity that is informed by Indigenous knowledges and ways of being, doing, and knowing? What are the potential consequences of using normative research tools—such as the EDI—as a method to build knowledge on children’s development with Indigenous Peoples and Aboriginal communities? This commentary suggests that from an Indigenous perspective, research on child development is valid and meaningful knowledge if it is clearly linked to the children’s and families’ wellbeing according to local cultural norms and values.     

Modeling Multisite Activity from Occupational Surveys: Deducing the Number of Anesthesiologists from a Count of Anesthesiology Posts in France

Reliable data on the total number of physicians practicing in France cannot be obtained from national professional or administrative files which are not kept to date. From a public health standpoint, the total number of physicians' posts in establishments matters more than the actual total number of physicians, although the latter is necessary for demographic projections and to determine training needs. Shared work in the same post is sometimes encouraged to avoid closure of the post or even of the establishment. The relationship between the total number of posts in an occupation and the total number of individuals working in those posts depend on the duration of a reference period for the enumeration. An original model of this relationship is developed and applied to a count of anesthesiology posts in France with different values of the reference period. Instead of the usual question “How many anesthesiologists are currently working in your hospital?” the model suggests that the right question is “How many anesthesiologists have been working in your institute since the last 2.5 weeks?”. The total number of anesthesia and intensive care practitioners estimated by the model is 8,992 which is lower than the direct count of 9,741 posts.     

How are the Kids Doing? How do We Know?

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