Tuesday 16th July
Wednesday 17th July
Thursday 18th July
Friday 19th July
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Quality of Life, Quality of Society |
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| Convenor | Dr Eric Harrison (City University London) |
| Coordinator 1 | Dr Ineke Stoop (SCP, Netherlands) |
The last decade has seen an increasing international focus on a number of dimensions of wellbeing. Many cross-national surveys carry measures of life satisfaction or happiness, and some invite respondents to evaluate their lives in terms of a series of domains. As a result we have data about differences in levels of wellbeing in a large number of countries. The next questions that arise are: 'How do differences among societies affect the well-being of those who live in them? Are some types of societies more successful than others at promoting individual lives and the collective development of the community How might the character of a society have such effects, and how are such societies built?' (Hall and Lamont 2009).
We invite submissions that: a) address the measurement of individual and/or societal wellbeing, b) tackle the problem of measuring the effects of 'national context', or c) present substantive analysis of data on individual or societal wellbeing in one or more countries.
The 'Families 24/7' study examines children's socio-emotional well-being in three European countries -- Finland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands -- in the context of a 24-hour economy. Non-standard hours, i.e. evening, night, early morning or weekend work, affect a great number of employees and their families. Despite this, research on the effects of parental working time on family life and child-well-being is scarce. The aim of this paper is to look at the relationship between working time and children's well-being in a comparative perspective. The countries in question differ in several contextual factors, such as women's labour market participation, working time patterns and available child-care arrangements.
In total, around 1300 working parents with children aged up to 12 years took part in the study. The sample consists of parents who work standard hours and those who work non-standard hours. Data collection took place between November 2012 and January 2013, via a web questionnaire. Measures included multiple questions about parental working time and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) for children's well-being.
In this paper, we compare children's well-being as well as the relationship between parental working time and children's well-being between the three countries. Furthermore, the paper addresses the methodological challenges of analyzing such cross-national data with different national policy and cultural contexts. On the basis of our findings we discuss whether some countries are more successful than others in
In this study we investigate if values' change may buffer the negative effect of economic downturn on psychological wellbeing. Utilising European Social Survey 2006 (pre-crisis) and 2010 (post-crisis data) we carried out meta-analysis to investigate if the increase in certain values on the country level is related to the increase in well-being, when controlling for economic situation. The results of meta-correlation analysis suggested that the increase in values of achievement was related, on a country-level, to a decrease in well-being, while the increase in tradition was related to the increase in well-being. The results of meta-regression suggested that next to increase in percentage of unemployed, the increase in value of security predicts the decrease in well-being on a country level. Compared to earlier results (Sagive & Schwartz, 2000), which suggested that conservation values are negatively related to well-being, current evidence suggests that economic adversity can reverse this relation for tradition, but not for security.
Set point theory describes life events as temporary effects on subjective well-being. Therefore persons return to their former satisfaction levels after adapting to life changing events like marriage or unemployment. Having children accounts also as such an important adult's life event. According to set-point theories it is expected that people strongly react to pregnancy and birth but adapt to the new situation of being parents and return slowly to their baseline level of satisfaction before pregnancy. A subset of persons becoming parents while participating at the longitudinal German Socio Economic Panel study (GSOEP) covers at the moment 26 years (1984 to 2010) and thus provides a database to test not only the long term effect of having children but also the causality of life satisfaction and parenthood. I use a multi-level approach to examine changes of life satisfaction before pregnancy, during pregnancy and after birth within individuals to identify effects of pregnancy and parenthood and whether differences between individuals like age, sex, partnership, number of children, education and income moderate these main effects.