Social Indicators Research最新文献

Young adults aged 18–28 represent a pivotal demographic whose experiences of inequality significantly shape their life trajectories in cities. Despite their potential for innovation and social advancement, public agendas often marginalize their needs and aspirations. This paper explores urban inequality among young adults by examining how they define and value different aspects of their daily lives when urban inequality is at play. Drawing on focus group discussions in two socioeconomically segregated urban districts in Bogotá, this paper employs the capability approach to construct a comprehensive list of 15 capability domains that young adults use to define and value their daily experiences. The paper adds to the existing literature a detail a step-by-step process involving the identification, selection, and ranking of relevant capabilities, with young adults actively engaged in value judgements through a deliberative process of public reasoning. Findings reveal that quality-of-life domains for young adults extend beyond traditional youth policy sectors, encompassing political participation, public space and mobility, social norms, and independence. The results not only expand the scope of existing youth agendas but also align with demands expressed during recent social unrest in Colombia and the region, where young adults have played a central and vocal role.

This paper studies factors explaining the gender mental health gap using Australian data. We show that men have significantly higher mean outcomes and the left tail of the combined distribution is disproportionately female. Using regression-based decompositions, we examine the degree that both socioeconomic inequalities and life experience account for this phenomenon. We find that disparities in income play a substantial role, and subject to an assumption of exogeneity, would be enough to account for the gender gap amongst individuals with very poor psychological wellbeing. We also examine the mental health effects of various negative life experience, such as the death of a family member or being a victim of violence. At the individual level, these variables have large effect sizes but are not strongly correlated with gender to explain our mental health disparities.

The growth of cities is an unstoppable phenomenon that began in the last century and will undoubtedly be one of the challenges of the current century. It is not only a question of urbanization; its implications and consequences extend to the economy, society, culture and the environment. The capacity of cities as engines of change and progress cannot be questioned, and its consequences will alter the lives of their citizens, who will search, in a more liquid world, for the best places to live. Therefore, this study aims to examine the influence of perception of urban quality (PUQ) and social trust and security (STS) on the life satisfaction (LS) of European citizens to find out if these variables are essential for the population living in Europe. The data were selected from the European Urban Audit survey, which covers 40,597 people living in 80 European cities. The analysis in this study is carried out at the city level. The partial least squares structural equation modelling approach was applied to verify the hypotheses. The findings reveal a positive correlation between PUQ and STS with LS, with STS being a mediator between PUQ and LS. These results underline that improving the perception of the urban environment can significantly increase well-being, contributing more than 70% to citizens' life satisfaction. This multidisciplinary analysis highlights the importance of considering various urban dimensions in planning and public policies to foster prosperous and satisfactory urban development.

Although flexible working has expanded rapidly, especially during the pandemic, biased views against flexible workers – namely, flexibility stigma - are still prevalent and returning. Flexibility stigma hinders worker’s take up of flexible working arrangements and can make flexible working arrangements result in negative outcomes for worker’s well-being and productivity. This study examines how national cultural and policy contexts shape flexibility stigma levels within a country. We use a multilevel approach using the Eurobarometer dataset of 2018, covering 28 European countries, matched with national level aggregate data on policy and culture. Results show that in countries with a more work-life balance work culture and egalitarian gender norms, we see less prevalence of flexibility stigma. Similarly, in countries with generous family-friendly policies, workers are less likely to have negative perception towards flexible working. Finally, stronger bargaining positions of workers, may it be through stronger union power or through better labour market conditions, helps remove stigmatised views around workers who use flexible working arrangements. This study evidences the importance of contexts that shape views around flexible working, to help us better understand policy changes needed to ensure better flexible working practices.

This study aims to investigate social mobility by introducing an innovative data source: surnames in newspapers. The core hypothesis posits that frequent mentions in newspapers are indicative of greater social relevance. Through the collection of local newspaper data in the municipality of Modena, Italy, from 1921 to 2011, we examine variations in the relative representation of surnames in newspapers with respect to their presence in registry data. The results suggest that surnames in newspapers are not a random sample of the population, supporting the assumption that they reflect social significance. Surnames belonging to privileged groups exhibit a higher representation compared to other social groups. This higher relative representation seems to be transmitted to future generations and converges over time toward the mean, with variations depending on the considered high-status group. This kind of analysis could contribute to identifying different mobility patterns at the local level and represents a useful alternative when established data sources, such as income, education, and occupational data, are not available.

The purpose of this article was to analyze the relationship of socioeconomic and educational determinants on life expectancy at birth in the 21 districts of the city of Madrid in 2019. An ecological and cross-sectional study was conducted. The independent variables studied were economic situation, educational level and being a user of public social resources for family care in the city of Madrid. Mean comparison, correlation and multivariate linear regression analysis were performed with the aim of estimating the relationship between these variables and life expectancy at birth in the districts of Madrid. The results show evidence of how the social determinants analyzed by district obtained high levels of association and predictive capacity with respect to life expectancy at birth in Madrid. In this sense, the regression model was able to explain 80.2% of the variance of life expectancy at birth. The study shows that socioeconomic determinants are associated and linearly related to life expectancy in periods prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in the city of Madrid. These results indicate that health policy planning should address social determinants as a starting point to reduce health inequalities and, therefore, to achieve actions aimed at improving the health of all citizens.

This article analyzes the ties of solidarity that exist in the communities that are part of the Purhépecha indigenous region, in Michoacán, Mexico. Through various investigations, we seek to lay the foundations for the construction of an index that would allow the measurement of “social cohesion”, considering that this is generated socially and historically, and is not necessarily determined from a rational-economic vision, but that the bases of social cohesion can be “based on the existence of a collective conscience, c0omposed of a system of values, norms and feelings and ideas common among all the people who make up society” that they are based on the indigenous worldview itself.

In this paper we present the GDL Vulnerability Index (GVI), a new composite index to monitor and analyse the human components of vulnerability to climate change, natural disasters, and other kinds of shocks, for societies and geographic areas across the globe. The GVI is a simple and flexible index designed for use by experts as well as non-experts in the climate field, including researchers, (local) politicians, NGO’s, journalists, advocacy groups and grassroot movements. The GVI is based on an additive formula that summarizes the essence of seven socioeconomic dimensions of vulnerability into a single number. This formula approach sets this index apart from other existing indices. Any person who knows the values of the underlying indicators can compute the vulnerability score of an area by filling in these values in the GVI formula. Validity tests show that the data-driven GVI measures the vulnerability dimensions coping capacity, adaptive capacity and susceptibility as well as major expert-based indices. This offers great prospects for use in situations where no other vulnerability information is available. Here we explain the construction of the GVI, test its validity and present GVI values for (almost) all countries of the world and for major global regions.

The objective of the article is to analyse the degree of persistence of overeducation in the initial stages of the professional career of young workers and the relationship between both the incidence and the persistence of overeducation and the business cycle. We use longitudinal data from administrative records (the ‘Continuous Sample of Working Life’) on the work trajectories of young Spaniards (16–35 years old) who enter the labour market for the first time at various moments in time (2005, 2009 or 2014) and estimate univariate and recursive bivariate probit models. The main findings are that nearly one third of entrants are overeducated in their first job, that their permanence in overeducation five years later is high (above 50%) and that the persistence of overeducation of young entrants is countercyclical.

The World Bank assessed that meeting the goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 appears to be challenging (or even impossible) for the world. This observation requires an urgent need for policymakers to explore potent instruments to combat poverty globally. Numerous studies have examined various determinants of poverty. However, financial literacy—a relatively new concept—remains underexplored, especially on a global scale. As such, this study is conducted to assess whether financial literacy can reduce the likelihood of falling into poverty using a unique dataset of 113 countries. We find that financial literacy has a significant and negative association with the likelihood of falling into poverty. Beyond association, the causal analysis shows that financial literacy exerts a negative effect on poverty. Our findings remain largely unchanged across different sub-samples based on socio-demographic factors, regions and country income levels, and robustness analyses.