Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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Assessing the cross-cultural equivalence of Well-Being approaches |
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| Convenor | Dr Wolfgang Aschauer (University of Salzburg) |
| Coordinator 1 | Professor Martin Weichbold (University of Salzburg) |
| Coordinator 2 | Professor Reinhard Bachleitner (University of Salzburg) |
Research on Wellbeing has gained enormous importance during the last years. The motivation to build indices starting from simple indicators of happiness and life-satisfaction towards new multidimensional measurements (e.g. The Gross-National Happiness concept emerging from Bhutan, the National Accounts of Wellbeing adopted in the ESS or the new ONS Wellbeing concept of Great Britain) has developed in a climate of realization, that economically-based measures are not fruitful enough to assess the "healthy" state of a society. Despite this boom, also with regard to cross-national research, the analysis of the comparability of Wellbeing approaches still remains in its infancy. It seems to be common in Wellbeing research to take the cross-cultural equivalence of the concept for granted and to neglect the use of statistical tools for equivalence testing. On the other hand following the common rules of thumb (e.g. with MGCFA) meaning to set certain preconditions that the same items must be valid across different nations can be problematic because till now there is no leading theory on Wellbeing and certain components of the construct are culturally sensitive.
Accepting cultural differences and including them in comparative research can be a way out of this dilemma. It seems that locally emerging concepts are often far more valid than approaches with the intent of being universally relevant. Therefore this session highlights the question: How do we best establish comparability under these circumstances and how can we use the strength of existing concepts of Wellbeing for cross-national research?
The session aims at participants who work in the field of Wellbeing research and international comparisons. We welcome speakers who statistically try to assess the cross-national equivalence of Wellbeing approaches or try to develop new conceptual frameworks of Wellbeing which can be applied to cross-national research.
Measures of subjective wellbeing show significant variation across countries; the Gallup World Poll, for example, shows an average life evaluation of just over 3 in Togo, compared to just under 8 in Denmark. While the distribution of average levels of wellbeing is broadly plausible, there are examples of countries where the level is higher than one might expect from an analysis of objective factors. For example, Japan is one of the wealthiest and healthiest countries in the world, but consistently scores relatively less well in terms of life satisfaction. There are some doubts about the validity of the reported results to compare wellbeing across countries; one source of doubt is the possibility of cultural measurement bias.
One approach to examining cultural bias is to use migrants as a natural experiment. By comparing the responses of, say French-born people living in the USA with the French-born population of France, we can identify whether the unobserved variance is associated more closely with "culture" or "country". The Gallup World Poll contains information on which country a person was born in, and so allows for this sort of analysis. It may also be of interest to examine whether country-specific effects are associated with other cultural variables, such as language and types of values (e.g. Hofstede's indices). For example, the low scores of Asian countries, such as Japan and others, may be due to values associated with predominant collectivistic societies.
Both the scientific and political community has recently begun questioning GDP as the supreme measure of a country's development, and turned to subjective well-being. However, comparative research on subjective well-being is still immature and arguably has a lot to learn from survey research. Two components of subjective well-being can be identified. First, there is an affective component reflecting individuals' levels of positive and negative feelings. Second, there is a cognitive component reflecting individuals' evaluations of their life. The bulk of comparative research has used single item measures ('happiness' or 'life satisfaction'), or composite scores, in order to study cross-national differences. In doing so, research on subjective well-being has ignored important insights from cross-national survey research concerning item selection and response bias, measurement error (using latent constructs), and establishing measurement equivalence/invariance across cultures. Moreover, most previous comparative studies have focused on life satisfaction while ignoring positive and negative affect, which is unfortunate since it excludes affect as a central component of subjective well-being. In this paper, we use multi-group structural equation modeling (MGSEM) and European Social Survey (ESS) data from 2006 to test for measurement equivalence and estimate latent means in subjective well-being across Europe. In order to build on recent empirical and theoretical insights from the field, we make the distinction between the affective (positive and negative) and cognitive components of subjective well-being and also test whether a single subjective well-being dimension (latent construct) finds empirical support.
Well-being is a multidisciplinary concept, hard to measure but at the same time very relevant for policy-makers and researchers. The purpose of our study is to examine the well-being of people in the cities built in Slovenia in the era of socialism. Velenje and Nova Gorica are two examples that we study in detail in the framework of the ReNewTown project (http://www.renewtown.eu/).
Both cities as we know them today were planned and built after the World War II, but for entirely different reasons:
1. Velenje, which today is one of the most important industrial centres of Slovenia (with a coalmine, an electrical power plant as well as an important European household appliances producer to employ the wives of the coalmine workers), was a designated city of light and gardens for miners who spend half of their day in the darkness of the pit;
2. Nova Gorica, which today is one of the most important service centres of Slovenia (with highly developed tourism industry, built around numerous casinos) was created to outshine the ‘old’ Gorica (Gorizia) which became part of Italy after the World War 2.
It is not despite but because of these historical differences as well as differences in the chosen (or better put predestined) path of economic development that the comparison between the two cities is so interesting.
Using survey methodology we study inhabitants' perceptions of well-being in both cities and compare them to the general level of well-being in Slovenia. This unique combination of well-being data for Slovenia and two of its important business centres allows us to link the path-dependent economic development with the satisfaction of the population.
The current economic crisis has severely affected European children placing them at greater risk of poverty than the overall population. Several scholars underline that children brought up into poverty are caught in a vicious circle of social exclusion and end up perpetuating the consequences of their deprived childhood to their own offspring. Hence, materially deprived children are inclined to reproduce future European societies with greater poverty, lower prospects of economic growth and probably higher inequality. During an era of deep recession, the most severe one since the Great Depression, the call to develop sensitive child material well-being measures becomes more urgent than ever. The paper critically evaluates the assessment of child material well-being via monetary and non-monetary indicators at a country and a household-level as not sensitive enough to capture how poverty is experienced by children. Furthermore, child material well-being measures are criticized as adult-devised ones that primarily derive from concepts originated from the study of adult material well-being; hence susceptible to minimize key aspects of children's own experiences of deprivation. It is advocated that child-centred subjective indicators via mixed method designs can become an important step toward filling the lacuna in child material well-being. Such an approach incorporates children's voices per se in all the stages of the research process and acknowledges their central role as competent social actors and as active participants.