Social Indicators Research最新文献

Background: While self-rated measures that rely on participant's perceptions of themselves are common in public health, they remain underused in contraceptive research. Family planning scholars often rely on researcher-ascribed measures of success that capture whether people have the criteria researchers deem necessary for a given outcome. As family planning researchers shift toward rights-based outcomes, understanding women's perceptions of their contraceptive knowledge is imperative.

Objective: We sought to determine whether researcher-ascribed measures of contraceptive knowledge or information provided during contraceptive counseling and self-rated measures of informed choice for contraception align. Informed choice captures whether people have sufficient, unbiased information about their contraceptive options.

Methods: Using data from a population-based sample of 3,929 reproductive-aged women in Burkina Faso, we compared researcher-ascribed measures, including the informed choice subdomain of the contraceptive autonomy indicator (CAIC) and the Method Information Index (MII), with novel self-rated measures of informed choice developed based on formative research, including in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, that capture people's perceptions of their contraceptive knowledge (self-rated overall informed choice and self-rated method-specific informed choice) using Cohen's Kappa Statistic.

Results: We find that researcher-ascribed measures of contraceptive knowledge and counseling content diverge substantially from self-rated measures of informed choice. CAIC and self-rated overall informed choice had no agreement (Kappa: -0.03); the MII and self-rated method-specific informed choice had no to slight agreement (Kappa=0.05). These findings reveal that the information researchers consider important for informed choice may not align with women's perceptions of their informed choice.

Conclusions: Both researcher-ascribed and self-rated measures provide uniquely important information needed to inform family planning programs and should be measured on population-based surveys.

Employees' lives are structured by when and how much they work, which we refer to as "work temporality." While Latinos, the largest racial/ethnic minority group in the U.S. labor force, are disproportionately employed in jobs with unpredictable work schedules, it is unclear how their time at work, broadly defined, varies within this group. This study addresses this gap by examining the temporal dimensions of work among Latinos in the U.S. by nativity and citizenship status and compares them to native-born White and Black workers. We analyze a range of detailed measures that capture the multidimensional nature of work temporality: duration (weekly hours), variability (changes in weekly hours), and timing (evening/night shifts, early/late weekday schedule, weekend work), in addition to conventional measures of non-standard work schedules. We estimate these conventional and detailed measures for five race/ethnicity/nativity/citizenship groups using the Survey of Income and Program Participation from 2014 to 2021. We assess whether these observed differences are maintained after controlling for compositional differences in demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic characteristics. The results indicate that relying wholly on conventional indicators can underestimate Latinos' exposure to non-traditional work schedules, particularly for female Latino non-citizens. Instead, considering the temporal dimensions of duration, variability, and timing in concert may be more informative. The findings contribute to our understanding of how Latinos' time at work is organized, and the stratifying roles of gender, nativity, and citizenship in the U.S. labor market.

The subjective happiness scale (SHS) is a brief instrument used to measure global subjective happiness that has been translated from its original English to many other languages. To date, there is no reported translation of this scale into Malayalam, a language spoken by over 32 million people especially in the southern state of Kerala, India. In the present study, 656 community-dwelling older adults participating in the Kerala Einstein study (KES) completed the Malayalam version of the SHS. The Malayalam version demonstrated high internal consistency and good convergent validity, as assessed by comparison to measures of depression and anxiety. We also used factor analysis to determine that the Malayalam version of the SHS has a unidimensional structure, akin to the original English as well as other language adaptations. Our study adds to the repertoire of tools to measure happiness in non-English-speaking populations, enabling future research to explore the foundations of well-being across diverse cultures.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11205-024-03448-y.

Wellbeing is a crucial policy outcome within sustainable development, yet it can be measured and conceptualised in various ways. Methodological decisions, such as how different components are weighted, can influence wellbeing classification. Many studies utilise equal weighting, assuming each component is equally important; however, does this reflect communities' lived experiences? This study outlines a multidimensional basic needs deprivation measure constructed from the Deltas, Vulnerability and Climate Change: Migration and Adaptation (DECCMA) survey dataset in Volta Delta, Ghana. Participatory focus groups, interviews and weighting exercises with communities and District Planning Officers (DPOs) explore different subgroups' wellbeing priorities. Comparative analysis examines the weights provided across genders, decision-making levels and livelihoods; including farming, fishing and peri-urban groups. Objective survey data is also combined with various subjective weights to explore the sensitivity of the overall deprivation rate and its spatial distribution. Significant weight differences are found between livelihoods, with farming and fishing communities weighting "employment", "bank access", and "cooperative membership" higher, whereas peri-urban communities apply a greater weight to "healthcare access". Differences between decision-making levels are also noted. Community members weight "employment" higher, while DPOs assign a larger score to "cooperative membership". In contrast, consistent weights emerge across genders. Furthermore, applying community livelihood weights produces lower deprivation rates across most communities compared to DPO or equal nested weights. Overall, significant differences between subgroups' weights and the sensitivity of wellbeing measurement to weighting selection illustrate the importance of not only collecting local weights, but also where and whom you collect weightings from matters.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11205-025-03524-x.

Both financial disadvantage and poor housing conditions are recognised as social determinants of poorer health and health inequalities across and within countries. In the UK and some other nations, low income and housing problems in interaction manifest as 'fuel poverty'-a measure of a household's ability to keep their homes warm. In these countries, tackling fuel poverty has become a priority, not least because of the known negative effects on health. Nevertheless, there is no gold standard measurement of fuel poverty, and there is also, more importantly, scant evidence on the relationship between fuel poverty and the development of long-term care needs among older people, which is important as understanding this relationship could inform preventative policy interventions aimed at reducing care needs and associated costs. Older people spend a larger proportion of their time indoors and the role of fuel poverty has wider health and social care impacts that go beyond immediate household hardship. This paper i) develops a data-driven measure of fuel poverty that goes beyond household income and energy consumption, ii) explores whether fuel poverty is associated with the development of care needs, an increase in care needs, and/or a decline in mental health among older people, and iii) whether there are any inequalities in the role played by fuel poverty across more potentially vulnerable groups. We use the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, a large representative sample of people aged 50 or over. Structural Equation Modelling was used to provide a latent and comprehensive definition of fuel poverty. We found that fuel poverty is associated with a greater risk of developing long-term care needs and worse mental health. We also found that fuel poverty is multidimensional and as such, influences the development of care needs from many fronts. We provide evidence on the importance of reducing fuel poverty as a potential prevention mechanism of higher (or development of) care needs, and is particularly relevant in the current energy and cost-of-living crisis context in many countries.

Communities' wellbeing in rural lower-middle-income countries is interlinked with climate and landscape characteristics. Rural inhabitants are often assumed to be "happy farmers", content with their livelihoods and social connections, despite the financial and material insecurities associated with their fragile environments. However, is this assumption an accurate reflection of reality? This study explores relationships between environmental conditions and subjective wellbeing in Volta Delta, Ghana. Subjective wellbeing is captured through a life domains happiness measure, calculated using the "Deltas, Vulnerability and Climate Change: Migration & Adaptation" survey dataset. A binary logistic model evaluates associations between low happiness, and environmental and control characteristics constructed from survey and remote sensing datasets. The quantitative approach supports the "happy farmer" identity, with lower probabilities of low happiness amongst rural households with a strong attachment to agricultural landscapes. However, the limited availability of permanent employment could offset these subjective benefits. Nevertheless, happiness is not a substitute for objective wellbeing, often defined through monetary wealth; therefore, sustainability policy should not be discouraged from providing tangible support to vulnerable communities. Volta Delta consists of varying landscapes, with model results also illustrating lower happiness within coastal locations, potentially linked to fears of hazards, restricted natural resource governance, and threats to intergenerational land and livelihoods. This study highlights the key role of environmental conditions in potentially influencing subjective wellbeing. Exploring relationships with subjective outcomes ensures sustainability policy captures non-tangible outcomes and feedback effects, which, if incorporated alongside objective targets, can ensure all costs, benefits and challenges are accounted for.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11205-025-03632-8.

Empirical evidence suggests that subjective well-being declined markedly in response to COVID-19 lockdown measures, followed by a gradual recovery, but not for all. Against this backdrop, this study employed linear random-effects regression models to analyse changes in subjective well-being across the general population, specifically among young people (aged 15-24) in Switzerland from 2017 to 2023. It also explored the pandemic-related consequences on youth. Using data from the Swiss Household Panel (N = 30,439 participants; n = 118,604 observations), the findings indicate that 2020 and 2021 marked a temporary deterioration within a broader, long-standing decline in subjective well-being. The results suggest that young people experienced more significant adverse effects than older age groups (45 +) during the short term (2020-2021) and the medium term (2022-2023) following the pandemic onset, though some recovery was observed more recently. Additionally, the study identified factors that mitigated the short-term pandemic-related psychological effects on youth, including being male, being Swiss by birth, having completed higher education, not living alone, and belonging to higher-income households. By identifying protective factors and resilience trajectories, policymakers and practitioners could design more targeted and effective interventions to promote youth well-being, thereby strengthening resilience and advancing a more equitable recovery in future crises.

This article analyses qualitative data from the HudsonUP unconditional basic income (UBI) experiment to examine changes to participants' human needs satisfaction. Human needs theories offer a holistic perspective on wellbeing and are widely employed in the sustainable welfare and post-growth literatures. However, they are under utilised in empirical UBI research. Through an inductive/deductive hybrid thematic analysis of interviews conducted at the baseline and three-year mark, the article examines changes in participants' ability to satisfy their needs of subsistence, protection, freedom, participation, affection, leisure, understanding, creativity, and identity over the course of the experiment. In doing so, it demonstrates the viability of applying needs-based approaches to UBI research. Findings indicate that the participants' ability to satisfy their material and non-material needs did increase over the course of the experiment. However, they continued to face barriers to full needs satisfaction. The findings suggest that cash alone is insufficient and proposals for an eco-social UBI - one which contributes to satisfying human needs within ecological limits - must also be accompanied by appropriate supply-side reforms. The article contributes to bridging the gap between theory and practice when it comes to the potential role of UBI in promoting socially just and sustainable welfare in line with post-growth perspectives.

Equality of opportunity (EOp) is a broad category of egalitarian theories that has attracted considerable attention in recent decades. Empirical implementations of EOp primarily focus on the explained component of inequality, classifying determinants of the outcome (e.g., health) into effort-legitimate causes of inequality-and circumstance-illegitimate causes of inequality. Largely overlooked is unexplained variation, which in statistical analysis manifests as residuals and is often ignored as a statistical annoyance. The true random component of residuals is now often referred to as luck. In this paper, we propose the playing field framework that serves as a pragmatic test as to whether residuals signal unfairness in empirical EOp analyses and that enables empirical explorations of roles of luck within the EOp framework. Using a large sample of Canadian older adults, our empirical application of the playing field framework shows that distributions of residuals are not always fair, though there is no consistent pattern of unfairness across age-sex groups. The paper's three main conclusions are: luck matters; luck should be explicitly incorporated in the EOp framework through the brute luck-effort characterization; and residuals are not just an innocuous statistical annoyance but can represent unfair inequality, and ignoring them can underestimate unfair inequality.

Empowering women is an explicit aim of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 and underpins 12 of the 17 SDGs. It is also a key objective of other pan-national agreements, such as the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme. Tracking global progress toward these goals requires being able to measure empowerment in ways that are consistent and comparable-both within and across countries. However, empowerment is a complex concept, hard to quantify, and even harder to standardize across contexts. Two large survey programs-Feed the Future and the Demographic Health Surveys-ask women about two aspects of empowerment, their control over income and input into decisionmaking. Each program uses a different set of questions administered to different sub-populations of women. We use data from 12 countries to show that large within-country inter-survey differences persist even after efforts to harmonize questions and samples. Where available, we compare the FTF and DHS with the Living Standards and Measurement Surveys-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture. We present several hypotheses related to survey structure and survey administration to explain these inter-survey differences. We then either test for or rule out the role of these competing theories in driving differences in levels and in associations with commonly used characteristics. Standardizing survey measures of decisionmaking and control over income and how they are administered is important to track progress toward the SDGs; meanwhile, caution should be exercised in comparing seemingly similar survey items across survey programs.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11205-025-03605-x.