Life Domain Satisfactions as Predictors of Overall Life Satisfaction Among Workers: Evidence from Chile

This article examines the subjective antecedents of life satisfaction of workers. Adopting a ‘bottom-up’ perspective, we assessed the unique influence that satisfaction with multiple life domains have on evaluative judgments of overall life satisfaction. Based on a nationwide sample of 530 Chilean workers, we simultaneously tested the effects of seven life domain satisfactions that have been consistently included in extant models of life satisfaction and subjective well-being. These were satisfaction with health, financial situation, social relationships, one’s self-worth, leisure-time, family, and work. Having controlled for age and gender, results showed that satisfaction with one’s financial situation was the dominant predictor of overall life satisfaction of workers, with a weight of .36. Satisfaction with family, work, and health had effects of .25, .14, and .14, respectively. Interestingly, satisfaction with one’s self-worth, leisure-time, and social relationships did not have statistically significant effects on life satisfaction, although the first two showed t values near the critical value.     

Congruency of the Cognitive and Affective Components of the Attitude as a Moderator on Intention of Condom Use Predictors

Using data gathered through questionnaires on factors relating to the intention of condom use included in the Theory of Planned Behavior, we obtained evidence in favor of the two-dimensional structure of attitude: affective and cognitive components. In a structural equation model for predicting the intention of condom use as an instrumental behavior, we found that the congruence between the affective and cognitive components moderates the influence of attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control in the intention of condom use. Since most of the studies do not take into account this proposed interaction, they can only report a kind of main effects average. Moreover, the percentage of explained variance of intention is higher for those individuals with the same value for the two components (congruent group). Furthermore, we found that perceived behavioral control is the most determining factor and that the cognitive component of the attitude is a better predictor than the affective one. The results are discussed from the point of view of their implications for designing prevention programmes for sexually transmitted diseases.     

Socio-economic Indexes in Surveys for Comparisons between Countries

The study of socio-economic inequalities from across-national perspective has been hampered by the lack of adequate common indices of socio-economic status that can be used in a self-report survey instrument. This paper examines the construction and the properties of global social indexes in general, and of the Family Affluence Scale (henceforth FAS) in particular. The paper proposes a new strategy for making comparisons of the global index with stratified data, building a revised FAS based on Adapted Canonical Variate Analysis (henceforth ACVA). This alternative strategy for constructing a global index is available in standard software, and the new proposal for stratified data only requires a simple program, which is justified, explained and provided in the text. Data come from the 1998 Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC), a WHO Cross-National Study using cluster sampling of schoolchildren from five countries: Denmark, Latvia, Portugal, Scotland and the USA. The results reveal that in every country we would have had a completely different evaluation of the three indicators of Family Affluence if we had used either linear or nonlinear approaches to compute the global indexes. Moreover, Family Affluence comparisons among countries shows that the relative contribution of the three indicators to the overall FAS, changes from country to country. We conclude that separate indicators of Family Affluence are not equally relevant in each country and, as a consequence, do not contribute equally to the global index. For cross-cultural studies, the strategy for constructing an index should be country specific. The methodological developments presented in the paper open up opportunities to study socio-economic patterning of health among young people in the developed world, since self completed surveys can now employ a common measure of family material wealth. The findings show that the RFAS (Revised FAS) is a useful index of socio-economic status for use in national and cross-national surveys of adolescent health and health behaviour. The new strategy for weighting observed indicators in the index gives it enhanced power to detect in equalities.     

Design of experimental studies for measurement and evaluation of the determinants of Job Satisfaction

In this paper the authors examine the methodology of data analysis and collection usually applied in Job-Satisfaction studies and more generally in Well-being research. In this field, data is collected through questionnaires and analysed using multivariate statistical techniques, a process which is commonly known as non-experimental research. The article points out some of the problems in this procedure and proposes an alternative experimental methodology which is applied to evaluate Job-Satisfaction over a Dutch random sample. Essentially it consists of the implementation of factorial designs in questionnaire construction. The use of fractional factorials is also discussed.