Subjective well-being and religiosity: significant associations among college students from Egypt and the United Kingdom

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 332-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed M. Abdel–Khalek ◽  
David Lester
Author(s):  
Wei Yue ◽  
Marc Cowling

It is well documented that the self-employed experience higher levels of happiness than waged employees even when their incomes are lower. Given the UK government’s asymmetric treatment of waged workers and the self-employed, we use a unique Covid-19 period data set which covers the months leading up to the March lockdown and the months just after to assess three aspects of the Covid-19 crisis on the self-employed: hours of work reductions, the associated income reductions and the effects of both on subjective well-being. Our findings show the large and disproportionate reductions in hours and income for the self-employed directly contributed to a deterioration in their levels of subjective well-being compared to waged workers. It appears that their resilience was broken when faced with the reality of dealing with rare events, particularly when the UK welfare support response was asymmetric and favouring waged employees.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Musikanski ◽  
Carl Polley

This essay focuses on ways in which the governments of Bhutan and the United Kingdom are measuring subjective well-being as well as on how other governments including Norway, Spain, China, Canada, and New Zealand, are exploring the development of subjective well-being indicators. It concludes with recommended actions to aid in the formation of a consistent and comparable subjective well-being indicator for use by governments globally. The third in a series for which the purpose is to provide information to grassroots activists to foster the happiness movement for a new economic paradigm, this essay builds on the previous essays, Happiness in Public Policy and Measuring Happiness to Guide Public Policy: A Survey of Instruments and Policy Initiatives.


2021 ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Paul V. Allin

From 2011 onward, surveys by the UK’s national statistics office have included four subjective well-being questions. This is specifically so that summary statistics about subjective well-being inform a broader assessment of national well-being along with other, largely objective measures, as well as anticipating policy needs. This chapter reviews how and why the four questions were chosen. The author focuses on their “practical utility,” a concept fundamental to all official statistics. He reports some progress in policy take-up of well-being statistics, though little media coverage, and a lack of evidence about whether people are thinking differently about their goals and their well-being based on well-being measures. Official statisticians must engage more with politics, policy, businesses, academia, and public opinion, thereby helping to stimulate demand for their outputs, including well-being measures. The author also questions how national well-being measures can be determined nationally while benefitting from international cooperation and standards.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110230
Author(s):  
Marloes Hoogerbrugge ◽  
Martijn Burger

Although more and more people choose to live in (large) cities, people in the Western world generally report lower levels of subjective well-being in urban areas than in rural areas. This article examines whether these urban–rural differences in subjective well-being are (partly) driven by selective migration patterns. To this end, we utilise residential mobility data from the United Kingdom based on 12 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. We explore urban–rural differences in life satisfaction as well as changes in life satisfaction of people moving from rural areas to urban areas (or vice versa), hereby paying specific attention to selection and composition effects. The results show that selective migration can, at least partly, explain the urban–rural subjective well-being differential through the selection of less satisfied people in cities and more satisfied people in the countryside. While the average life satisfaction of urban–rural migrants is higher compared to the life satisfaction of rural–urban migrants, we do not find – on average – long-lasting life satisfaction effects of migration. At the same time, there are differences between sociodemographic groups in that we find that a move from the countryside to the city is positively associated with the life satisfaction of students while it is negatively associated with the life satisfaction of people with a non-tertiary education.


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