Beyond GDP: happiness is about more than just individuals

This post is reposted, with permission by Prof Claire Wallace, University of Aberdeen. The article first appeared on The Conversation.

Many readers of this piece will be aware that economists are rethinking the role of happiness and GDP. They question facile assumptions about economic growth alone being good for us. What’s the good of being better off if it doesn’t make people any happier? There has also been a vast literature in psychology looking at individual well-being and its determinants. If money doesn’t make us happy, what does?

Both these groups focus on individual well-being. While this is important it does tend to feed into the neo-liberal agenda by putting less emphasis on collective happiness. It also supports the burgeoning self-help industry. It implies that if you are not happy you should do something about it. Happiness is an individual problem.

Happiness is a fleeting and ephemeral emotion that is difficult to capture in statistical analysis. For this reason, social scientists have tended to focus on various measures of well-being in addition to emotional states, such as life satisfaction, freedom to flourish and also negative states – the absence of well-being. Again the emphasis is on the individual and their immediate environment.

Society on the agenda

But what sort of society allows people to live well? The focus on economy tends to look at money -– is it enough? The focus on individual well-being asks, what can I do to make my life happier? But both these approaches neglect the social context, even though it is tremendously important for explaining well-being and could also be an important focus for policy developers. What aspects of society can foster well-being?

There has been a long tradition of quality-of-life research in Europe measured through social indicators. The University of Mannheim in Germany collates and analyses them across various categories: work, family, housing, health, and so forth. This research has influenced the EU policy agenda as well as that of particular nations such as Italy, Austria and Germany.

The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions has been carrying out surveys and publishing reports to help our understanding of well-being across Europe since 2003 including both the EU and accession countries.

In the UK, a question on well-being has been added to standard national surveys, which should help us understand what affects it in future. The Scottish parliament this week held a meeting and exhibition to present well-being measures to look at how they could be incorporated into the country’s national performance framework.

More policy bodies are starting to pay attention to all this research. The OECD, for example, has launched a “Better Life” initiative and the EU a set of measures for measuring life quality through Eurostat.

Component parts

We know well-being can be influenced by public services and social policies. It is clear for example that in Turkey, the recent strides in improving public policies and services have had an impact on well-being. Even really poor countries such as Rwanda have been able to improve their quality of life by focusing on policies to improve societal well-being.

On the other hand, societies where social safety nets have been removed and where people are subject to sudden and bewildering change have plummeting well-being. This is noticeable in the former Soviet Union and other ex-communist countries in eastern Europe. Yet equally those that joined the EU and have enjoyed improved social services have seen their well-being improve once more.

Based on these kinds of insights, my research team uses a framework called “social quality” to analyse the happiness of a society. This involves combining objective assessments of well-being – are basic needs such as shelter, social security, health fulfilled? – with subjective measures such as how people assess their economic well-being, health and housing. You may have a good house or a bad house – but is it what you want?

We look at four main aspects: socio-economic security, social cohesion, social inclusion and social empowerment. In looking at socio-economic security we have found that a person’s actual income plays only a part in explaining life satisfaction.

More important is how adequately people view their income and the extent to which their life is secured over the longer term. This depends on the social security environment in which they live, which forms part of what researchers sometimes call the “social wage”. This helps support a decent living standard across the age groups and in reducing differences between rich and poor (up to a point).

Social cohesion has long been studied by sociologists. It is a slippery concept, perhaps more so than life satisfaction, but we know it is closely linked to happiness. A recent study identified three main elements of social cohesion: deep social ties and networks, a sense of belonging to a nation or community and a focus on the common good. Trust is an important indicator of the first and second of these elements - including trust in other people and trust in public institutions.

In testing these perceptions across the world, Scandinavia came top – small, wealthy, well managed societies seem to have an advantage here. Yet some larger and more diversified countries scored next-highest, including Australia and Canada (along with New Zealand). The UK and most of the remainder of Europe appear one group further down the rankings.

 The same writers have also shown that social cohesion can change. Greece for example has lost social cohesion on account of the economic crisis since 2009, while Slovakia and Romania have gained it. Rising inequality can disrupt social cohesion leading to less trust and less connectedness. And inequality is not just bad for the worst off, since it has a negative impact on social cohesion as a whole. Civil strife and conflict also undermine cohesion.

Inclusion and empowerment

If social cohesion refers to the glue holding society together, social inclusion involves the extent to which individuals feel part of it and the mechanisms for including them. This can be through being part of the workforce, membership of clubs and associations and also families – those in such partnerships are generally happier. Being involved in a local community or through voluntary activity can play an important part too, while fear of crime and violence might isolate people.

Finally, social empowerment refers to the extent to which people have control over their lives and feel enabled to live as they would like. This requires a reasonable standard of health and education as a condition for participation, for example. Feeling disempowered is one of the most important elements for explaining lack of happiness.

These different elements are important for describing the decent society, which is also the happy society. They can help to explain how we can build better societies, too. Any approach to measure or increase happiness that ignores this side of the equation is insufficient.

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This article is part of an ongoing series of blogs by The Conversation on Beyond GDP, looking at the dominance of GDP in economic thinking and how that might change.

Prof Wallace has received grants from the European foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions for analysing the European Quality of Life Surveys and is writing a book “The Decent Society” for Routledge with Pamela Abbott and Roger Sapsford.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
       

Children, young people and the everyday

This month, Emma Davidson, Fiona Morrison (both CRFR) and Lisa Whittaker (Glasgow University) were lucky enough to present their research findings at the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth International Conference. The conference explored the concept of the ‘everyday’, and its role in helping researchers gain insight into children and young people’s social worlds. In this blog, we share our perspectives on everyday life and agency.

How an individual behaves, feels and relates to the people and spaces around them often consists of social practices considered mundane, routine and even unimportant – like walking to school, washing the dishes, watching TV or playing outdoors. These seemingly ‘ordinary’ activities can tell us much about children’s social worlds, and more importantly, the wider structural context within which these worlds sit.

At the conference we presented three unique papers, connected by two central themes. The first was an appreciation that the everyday is not simply a site where individuals are socialised and social practices reproduced. Rather, the everyday, as Beverley Skeggs has discussed, can be a space were norms and values are interpreted, navigated and potentially challenged. By acknowledging the role of agency, the everyday is a space in which children and young people can shape and make the social worlds around them.

The second theme around which our papers fell relates to the type of behaviour and actions the ‘everyday’ seeks to describe. Typically, the everyday has been conceptualised as that which is mundane or otherwise unimportant. What then of the everyday experiences of children and young people whose lives are characterised by issues far from mundane – such as violence, neglect and abuse?

Emma’s research into young men and violence found that in disadvantaged areas some young men not only normalised violence, but actively sought out a deviant identity as a means of escaping the structural inequalities they faced. Lisa and Emma’s project meanwhile spoke of the experiences of growing up in care, and the difficult transitions young people made into adulthood. Despite support, many of these young people’s pathways were beset by chaos and disorder, so much so it had become a predictable and expected part of everyday life. Finally, Fiona’s research explored children’s perspectives of contact with non-resident fathers when there is domestic abuse. She focused on how children spoke about their experiences of domestic abuse, how they made sense of abuse and how they navigated and responded to abuse in their everyday lives.

The finding that cut across the three papers was that while disorder and risk was not a welcome aspect of children and young people’s everyday lives, it became an all-consuming presence which was then reconstructed as normal, routine and ordinary. This response, the papers conclude, was a means through which they could give order and stability to aspects of their lives that were anything but. The papers all highlighted how children and young people continue to exercise agency and resist, even when their everyday lives are characterised by ‘disorder’ and ‘risk’. These emancipatory possibilities, however small, gave young people agency in circumstances over which they had very little control.

Contact Emma by email.

Researching the lives of disabled children and young people: are they any different from non-disabled children?

The vast majority of disabled children and young people in the western world live at home with their families, most attend mainstream schools, and disabled children have the same rights to inclusion and equal treatment as non-disabled children and young people. Yet, they often remain left out – from generic children’s research, from policy-making about children’s services and, in their everyday lives, from inclusion in friendship groups and social and sporting activities.

So begins the editorial of the current special issue of Children & Society, dedicated to highlighting the views, experiences and opinions of disabled children and young people through the presentation of cutting-edge research and examination of current issues at policy level. Including the views of families affected by disability in mainstream research and literature is something that CRFR is keen to promote; it forms a central aim of the About Families project to support the development of evidence-based parenting services, and disability issues feature in research agendas across our work.

Considerable progress has been made in the last 20 years. The voices of disabled children and young people are increasingly included in research across a range of disciplines and the focus of research has shifted more recently to consider aspects of family functioning, relationships between families and professionals, transition to adulthood, identity, friendships and social lives. These topics feature in some of the papers included in the journal.  The publication of this special issue within a generic children’s journal marks an important achievement in itself – and we echo the editorial team when they express their hope that it won’t be necessary or appropriate to continue publishing work relating to disabled children in separate literature or within the confines of special issues. What this issue succeeds to do, and what has emerged from the About Families project is that the challenges, preferences and issues facing disabled children as they go through their lives remains largely the same as non-disabled children, albeit many disabled children face additional practical and social barriers to achieving their goals.

CRFR is delighted to welcome this special issue and congratulates everyone involved in its publication.

The contents include:

·         Editorial: Researching the Lives of Disabled Children - Kirsten Stalker

·         The challenge and challenging of Childhood Studies? Learning from disability studies and research with disabled children - Kay Tisdall

·         Theorising the lives of disabled children: How can disability theory help? - Nick Watson

·         Everyday segregation amongst disabled children and their peers: a qualitative longitudinal study in Norway - Borgunn Ytterhus

·         Understanding disabled childhoods: What can we learn from population studies? -  Eric Emerson

·         Rights of Disabled Children and their Families: a decade of policy change - Janet Read, Clare Blackburn and Nick Spencer

·         Working on well-being: researchers' experiences of a participative approach to understanding the subjective well-being of disabled young people - Bryony Beresford

·         Other Voices, Other Rooms: Reflections on talking to young men with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and their families about transition to adulthood - David Abbott

·         Disabled Children's Voices: The nature and role of future empirical enquiry - John Carpenter and Roy McConkey

·         Practice Piece: Sixth Sense: The Disabled Children and Young People's Participation Project - Rosemary Murray.

Access the special issue at: ‘The Everyday Lives of Disabled Children and Young People: New developments in research and policy’, Special issue: Children & Society, 26 (2012) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/chso.2012.26.issue-3/issuetoc

All papers from the ESRC seminar series which led to the special issue are available from: http://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/schoolofappliedsocialsciences/socialwork/esrcseminarseries/

Learn more about About Families at: http://www.aboutfamilies.org.uk/.

New journal on families and relationships launched

 

CRFR is pleased to support the launch of a new social science journal, Families, Relationships and Societies. The journal explores family life, relationships and generational issues from a social science perspective and with a strong policy and practice focus. The aim to present high-calibre work and stimulate debate has been well achieved in the first issue:

• Editorial: Tess Ridge and Brid Featherstone
• An ethic of care and sibling care in older age: Marian Barnes
• Doing family, contesting gender and expanding affinity: Family practices of married women in Hong Kong: Anita Chan
• Family structure, family stability and outcomes of five-year-old children: Terry-Ann Craigie et al.
• Farewell to family? Notes on an argument for retaining the concept: Ros Edwards
• The effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving access to the health and mental health services for looked after children and young people: A systematic review: Roy Jones et al.
• Reflections on governing the family: The close relationship between child protection and social work in advanced Western societies – the example of England: Nigel Parton
• Care relations and public policy: Social justice claims and social investment frames: Fiona Williams
• Open Space: A review of social trends and family and relationships policies in England and Wales: Martina Klett-Davies

 Marian Barnes offers insight into the under-researched area of sibling care, and together with Anita Chan's article on married women in Hong Kong, demonstrates the value of qualitative approaches in exploring family practices. The journal has taken on an international perspective and the quantitative study by Craigie, Brooks-Gunn and Waldfogel from the United States is an important contribution to a contested area in families research. Edwards and Gillies have offered a similarly stimulating argument, and the editorial team are hopeful that many readers respond to the ideas put forward in these two articles in forthcoming issues. The systematic review by Roy Jones and colleagues, and the article by Nigel Parton are required reading for those interested in child welfare and protection, and again the editors would welcome alternative views of policy and practice in this area. Finally Fiona Williams' article builds on her groundbreaking work on care ethics.

Open Space is a unique feature of the journal providing space for more critical reviews of research, policy, practice initiatives and recent publications and providing an opportunity, over time, for authors to test out new viewpoints, stimulate debates and bring one another up-to-date on local and global contexts. Martina Klett-Davies kicks this off with a policy review in the area of relationships support.

The journal is available in print and online, and all institutions have free online access to the journal in 2012. Go to http://www.policypress.co.uk/journals_frs_trial.asp? for more information.

CRFR would like to congratulate everyone on the editorial board for this important contribution.