Multidimensional Analysis of Deprivation and Fragility Patterns of Migrants in Lombardy,Using Partially Ordered Sets and Self-Organizing Maps

Social Indicators Research - In this paper, we present a multidimensional fuzzy analysis of the levels and the patterns of poverty and social fragility of migrants’ families, in the Italian...     

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.     

A Reduced Posetic Approach to the Measurement of Multidimensional Ordinal Deprivation

In this paper, we discuss the existence of particular systems of generators for posets associated to multidimensional systems of ordinal indicators and derive a reduced posetic procedure for the measurement of multidimensional ordinal deprivation. The proposal is motivated by the need to lessen the computational complexity of the original posetic procedure described in Fattore (Soc Indic Res 128(2):835–858, 2015), so as to make it applicable to larger multi-indicator systems, particularly to those comprising many variables scored on “short” scales, as typical in deprivation studies. The reduced procedure computes identification and severity functions based only on so-called lexicographic linear extensions. These are a particular generating system for the basic achievement poset, naturally associated to rankings of deprivation attributes. After motivating this choice, both from an interpretative and a computational point of view, the paper provides some simulated examples, comparing the reduced and the non-reduced procedures.     

Some Considerations on Well-Being Evaluation Procedures,Taking the Cue from “Exploring Multidimensional Well-Being in Switzerland: Comparing Three Synthesizing Approaches”

In this short paper, we outline some considerations on three different procedures for the statistical evaluation of multidimensional well-being, taking the cue from a recent paper of Iglesias et al. There, the authors apply and compare Confirmatory Factor Analysis, the Alkire–Foster counting approach and the Partial Order Approach on real data, pointing out limitations and potentialities of each procedure. To deepen, and partially correct, some of their (albeit interesting) remarks, here we review the fundamental features of those approaches, so as to shed light on their structural differences and to show that they move from, and may lead to, alternative views on well-being.