The family is the core institution for child-rearing worldwide, and decades of research have shown that strong families promote positive child outcomes. For this reason theWorld Family Map Project monitors family well-being and investigates how family characteristics affect children’s healthy development around the globe. Families do not operate in a vacuum: their ability to provide for their children and supervise their development depends not only on parenting behaviors and attitudes but also on the social, economic, and policy environments that surround them. Yet efforts to strengthen families are often considered off-limits or of low priority for policy and programmatic interventions, especially in times of financial strain. With the indicators and analyses presented here, this project points individuals, families, communities, NGOs, and governments to some key factors affecting child and family well-being that policies and programs can shape in order to foster strong families and positive outcomes for children.

The World Family Map Project monitors global changes in the areas of family structure, family socioeconomics, family processes, and family culture, focusing on 16 specific indicators selected by an expert group because of their known relationships to child outcomes in the research literature. Each annual report of the project provides the latest data on these indicators, as well as an original essay focusing on one aspect of the family and how it relates to child well-being in different parts of the world. In both the indicators and the essay, the highest quality data available are shared for countries that are representative of each region of the world. Scholars around the globe contribute to the project as advisors and analysts, stimulating a large community of researchers to improve data and research on families and children.

The inaugural edition of the World Family Map provided indicators of family well-being worldwide and an essay focusing on family living arrangements and education outcomes. This second annual edition of the World Family Map, sponsored by Child Trends and a range of educational and nongovernmental institutions from across the globe, provides updated indicators and a new essay focusing on union stability and early childhood health in developing countries, as well as a brief analysis of psychological distress among 9- to 16-year-olds in the European Union.

Read more.

Among the many documented benefits of a college education is a higher level of self-reported happiness. The present work considers instead the level of demonstrated happiness and unhappiness within groups, the latter proxied by the conditional probability of suicide within groups having a college education and those without.

[Read more…]

The lackluster economic recovery, which is now more than 50 months old, has not brought relief to American individuals, families and communities. According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 10.2 million Americans are unemployed. 3.6 million have been jobless for more than 27 weeks.7.3 million are involuntarily working part-time.

People who believe they control their own destiny actually live longer than people who lack that sense. The effect was muted among the highly educated — but for people with less schooling, an ethic of personal responsibility literally proved to be a life-saver.

In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has dropped in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the “very unhappy” and the “perfectly happy.”

This study examines how parent income, inequality, school quality, social capital, and family stability affect intergenerational upward mobility.

The affective profiles model categorizes individuals as self-fulfilling (high positive affect, low negative affect), high affective (high positive affect, high negative affect), low affective (low positive affect, low negative affect), and self-destructive (low positive affect, high negative affect). The aim of the present study was to investigate differences between profiles regarding happiness, depression, and satisfaction.

Considerable research has been devoted to examining the relations between self-esteem and social support. However, the exact nature and direction of these relations are not well understood. … Self-esteem reliably predicted increasing levels of social support quality and network size across time. In contrast, the consequence model was not supported.

Although much research has examined the effect of income on happiness, we suggest that how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. Specifically, we hypothesized that spending money on other people may have a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself.

Economists are trained to infer preferences from observed choices; that is, economists typically watch what people do, rather than listening to what people say. Happiness research departs from this tradition. Instead, happiness researchers have been particularly interested in self-reports of well-being.

Emerging sources of optimism exist regarding the possibility of permanent increases in happiness. Drawing on the past well-being literature, the authors propose that a person’s chronic happiness level is governed by 3 major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness, happiness-relevant circumstantial factors, and happiness-relevant
activities and practices.

Current research on well-being has been derived from two general perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization.

An improved instrument, the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ), has been derived from the Oxford Happiness Inventory, (OHI). The OHI comprises 29 items, each involving the selection of one of four options that are different for each item. The OHQ includes similar items to those of the OHI.

Material aspirations are initially fairly similar among income groups; consequently more income brings greater happiness. Over the life cycle, however, aspirations grow along with income, and undercut the favorable effect of income growth on happiness, although the cross-sectional happiness-income difference persists. People think they were less happy in the past and will be happier in the future.

Reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is able to contribute important insights for economics. We report how the economic variables income, unemployment and inflation affect happiness as well as how institutional factors, in particular the type of democracy and the extent of government decentralization, systematically influence how satisfied individuals are.

Institutional factors in the form of direct democracy (via initiatives and referenda) and federal structure (local autonomy) systematically and sizeably raise self-reported individual well-being in a cross-regional econometric analysis. This positive effect can be attributed to political outcomes closer to voters’ preferences, as well as to the procedural utility of political participation possibilities.