scholarly journals Reflections on the Introduction of Official Measures of Subjective Well-Being in the United Kingdom

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Paul V. Allin
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Objective Measures ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Official Statistics ◽  
National Statistics ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Thinking Differently

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.

The Covid-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom and subjective well-being: Have the self-employed suffered more due to hours and income reductions?

2021 ◽  
pp. 026624262098676 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Yue ◽  
Marc Cowling
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Rare Events ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Data Set ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Hours Of Work ◽  
Period Data ◽  
The Uk

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.

scholarly journals Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Measuring What Matters

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Musikanski ◽  
Carl Polley
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
Policy Initiatives ◽  
The Third ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Economic Paradigm

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.

scholarly journals Selective migration and urban–rural differences in subjective well-being: Evidence from the United Kingdom

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110230
Author(s):  
Marloes Hoogerbrugge ◽  
Martijn Burger
Keyword(s):  
Life Satisfaction ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Selective Migration ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Urban Rural

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.

scholarly journals Impact of vaccination on new SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United Kingdom

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Pritchard ◽  
Philippa C. Matthews ◽  
Nicole Stoesser ◽  
David W. Eyre ◽  
Owen Gethings ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Viral Load ◽  
Threshold Value ◽  
Community Based ◽  
National Statistics ◽  
Private Households ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Viral Burden ◽  
General Community ◽  
Nose And Throat

AbstractThe effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination in preventing new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections in the general community is still unclear. Here, we used the Office for National Statistics COVID-19 Infection Survey—a large community-based survey of individuals living in randomly selected private households across the United Kingdom—to assess the effectiveness of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer–BioNTech) and ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (Oxford–AstraZeneca; ChAdOx1) vaccines against any new SARS-CoV-2 PCR-positive tests, split according to self-reported symptoms, cycle threshold value (<30 versus ≥30; as a surrogate for viral load) and gene positivity pattern (compatible with B.1.1.7 or not). Using 1,945,071 real-time PCR results from nose and throat swabs taken from 383,812 participants between 1 December 2020 and 8 May 2021, we found that vaccination with the ChAdOx1 or BNT162b2 vaccines already reduced SARS-CoV-2 infections ≥21 d after the first dose (61% (95% confidence interval (CI) = 54–68%) versus 66% (95% CI = 60–71%), respectively), with greater reductions observed after a second dose (79% (95% CI = 65–88%) versus 80% (95% CI = 73–85%), respectively). The largest reductions were observed for symptomatic infections and/or infections with a higher viral burden. Overall, COVID-19 vaccination reduced the number of new SARS-CoV-2 infections, with the largest benefit received after two vaccinations and against symptomatic and high viral burden infections, and with no evidence of a difference between the BNT162b2 and ChAdOx1 vaccines.

Religious motifs within reporting of the 7/7 London bombings in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Poland: A transnational agenda-setting network study

Journalism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 1323-1342
Author(s):  
Damian Guzek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Religion And Ethnicity ◽  
Media Globalization ◽  
London Bombings

Existing studies have examined the significance of UK media coverage of the 7/7 London bombings. This article seeks to widen this analysis by exploring the coverage of 7/7 in the leading newspapers of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Poland comparatively using a new agenda-setting perspective that is grounded within network analysis. The study is devised to respond specifically to the contrasting arguments about the influence of media globalization versus religion and ethnicity on this reporting. It finds that the diverse approaches to religion within the countries of the analyzed newspapers appear to mitigate the reproduction of shared religious narratives in this reporting. Nevertheless, the analyzed coverage does carry common attributes and these, it argues, can be explained broadly by the influence of a US-dominated ‘lens on terror’.

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