Social Indicators Research最新文献

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.

There has been a growth in the use of multidimensional job quality indices, yet the job quality agenda has had a limited impact on public policymaking. This has partly been attributed to disagreements over how to measure job quality and, in particular, weight different indicators of indices. A further reason is a tendency to use international indices, which lack the sample size to explore important country-level inequalities in job quality. To address these issues, this paper presents findings from four different weighting methods for a new synthetic index of the Quality of Work (QoW) for the United Kingdom, using data from a large national survey (Understanding Society). The UK QoW Index contains 7 dimensions and 15 indicators. Several novel indicators argued to be particularly important to the UK context are developed, including health & safety and long-term job prospects. The paper defaults to a widely-used equal weighting approach informed by the Alkire-Foster method, but simultaneously presents findings using alternative hedonic, frequency-based and data-driven weighting methods. The paper then analyses inequalities and changes in job quality from 2012 to 2021; and differences in job quality by type of employment (self-employed, platform labour or gig economy), previous employment status (prior unemployment spell), sex, age, ethnicity and region, according to these four weighting methods. Save for hedonic weighting, these show a broad consistency in many of the key findings: namely, inequalities in job quality between most of the same sub-groups; and a growing polarisation in job quality between employees and self-employed workers.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11205-025-03542-9.

A longstanding argument in the field of institutional trust reads that trust is the outcome of a process of socialization. This approach suggests that institutional trust may be understood as a set disposition that is shaped during one's impressionable years (i.e., adolescence and pre-adulthood) and no longer systematically updated during an iterative process afterwards. Consequently, this disposition forms a baseline around which trust judgments tend to vary. Yet, this process of socialization to (dis)trust has not been studied directly. To fill this gap, this paper tests two rivalling models derived from cultural sociology. The active updating model implies that attitude baselines continue to be updated durably throughout a lifetime, whereas the settled dispositions model suggests that these attitudes remain relatively stable over a lifetime: longitudinal variation can be understood as random noise to the model. To test these models, this paper employs two panel data sets in the Netherlands (2018-2022) that measure trust in politics and other institutions annually: the LISS panel (covering the adult population) and the Dutch Adolescent Panel on Democratic Values (covering students in secondary education from age 12). We find evidence supporting the impressionable years hypothesis: while political trust is still subject to repeated updating among adolescents, it has settled into a disposition among adults. As such, our study highlights the relevance of socialization processes for the formation of institutional trust (during adolescence), as well as the relevance of a dispositional root of public attitudes (during adulthood). These findings have important implications for our understanding of both the determinants and consequences of institutional trust.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic could have caused both monetary and non-monetary distributional changes, existing studies have only investigated its immediate monetary impacts. This study examines the pandemic's medium-term impacts on income and well-being inequality using individual longitudinal data from the Japan Household Panel Survey. Gini coefficients and income mobility before and after the pandemic are calculated to analyze income inequality. Various well-being measures such as mental health and life satisfaction are used to analyze well-being inequality. The findings reveal no increase in income inequality. Progressive income growth ensured stable inequality throughout the pandemic. Conversely, on average, well-being worsened, and well-being inequality increased. Furthermore, we find an association between income and well-being inequality. The random-effects and fixed-effects models indicate that the well-being of the high-income group tended to improve, whereas that of the low-income group tended to deteriorate after the outbreak of the pandemic. Additionally, the causal mediation analysis shows that the adoption of remote work served as a factor for the increase in the well-being of people in the high-income group. Remote work became disproportionately prevalent during the pandemic, especially among people in the higher income group. This group experienced various benefits of remote work, which contributed to an improvement in their well-being and an increase in well-being inequality.

Social outcomes from conservation and development activities on a local scale are often assessed using five livelihood assets—Natural, Physical, Human, Financial and Social—and their associated indicators. These indicators, and the variables used to measure them, are typically based on ‘common practice’ with limited attention being paid to the use of alternative indicators. In this article, we present a typical survey of socioeconomic benefits for ecological restoration workers in South Africa, and ask whether the common livelihood indicators used are adequate and sufficient, or whether any relevant indicators are missing. Results from the livelihood survey show the value of income, food and education as strong indicators of financial and human assets, and the importance of open-ended questions in eliciting details of workers’ perceived changes in their livelihoods. However, by complementing the survey results with qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and stakeholder workshops, we show how unconventional livelihood indicators and aspects provide a deeper understanding of changes in livelihoods that are tied to restoration projects. We guide scholars and practitioners to advance their process of selecting livelihood indicators, in particular to include three additional types of indicators: intangible indicators to assess life quality; relative indicators reaching across spatial and temporal scales to capture community outcomes and livelihood resilience; and, political indicators to uncover causal relationships.

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of Lebanon’s severe economic crisis, a situation aggravated by the collapse of Banque du Liban’s financial strategies, delayed reforms by the government, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the devastating Beirut Port explosion. These events have precipitated a sharp decline in disposable income, soaring inflation rates, and an alarming increase in unemployment and multidimensional poverty. Central to this study is a comprehensive field survey that examines eighteen coping mechanisms adopted by workers in various economic sectors of Lebanon. From this survey, we introduce a new index designed to systematically categorize and evaluate these coping strategies across four critical dimensions of well-being: nutrition, healthcare, education, and financial issues. We use this index to quantify and understand the extent to which workers have relied on these coping mechanisms, offering novel insights into the socio-economic repercussions of the crisis.

Explaining what leads to higher or lower levels of subjective well-being (SWB) in childhood and adolescence is one of the cornerstones within this field of studies, since it can lead to the development of more focused preventive and promotion actions. Although many indicators of SWB have been identified, selecting one over the other to obtain a reasonably short list poses a challenge, given that models are particularly sensitive to the indicators considered.Two Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, one based on Extreme Gradient Boosting and Random Forest and the other on Lineal Regression, were applied to 77 indicators included in the 3rd wave of the Children’s Worlds project and then compared. ExtremeGradient Boosting outperforms the other two, while Lineal Regression outperforms Random Forest. Moreover, the Extreme Gradient Boosting algorithm was used to compare models for each of the 35 participating countries with that of the pooled sample on the basis of responses from 93,349 children and adolescents collected through a representative sampling and belonging to the 10 and 12-year-olds age groups. Large differences were detected by country with regard to the importance of these 77 indicators in explaining the scores for the five-item-version of the CWSWBS5 (Children’s Worlds Subjective Well-Being Scale). The process followed highlights the greater capacity of some ML techniques in providing models with higher explanatory power and less error, and in more clearly differentiating between the contributions of the different indicators to explain children’s and adolescents’ SWB. This finding is useful when it comes to designing shorter but more reliable questionnaires (a selection of 29 indicators were used in this case).