scholarly journals The varying impacts of COVID-19 and its related measures in the UK: A year in review

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. e0257286
Author(s):  
Muzhi Zhou ◽  
Man-Yee Kan

We examine how the earnings, time use, and subjective wellbeing of different social groups changed at different stages/waves of the pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK). We analyze longitudinal data from the latest UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS) COVID study and the earlier waves of the UKHLS to investigate within-individual changes in labor income, paid work time, housework time, childcare time, and distress level during the three lockdown periods and the easing period between them (from April 2020 to late March 2021). We find that as the pandemic developed, COVID-19 and its related lockdown measures in the UK had unequal and varying impacts on people’s income, time use, and subjective well-being based on their gender, ethnicity, and educational level. In conclusion, the extent of the impacts of COVID-19 and COVID-induced measures as well as the speed at which these impacts developed, varied across social groups with different types of vulnerabilities.

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852110331
Author(s):  
Giacomo Vagni

Time together as a family is a crucial dimension of family life. However, its impact on personal happiness is not well understood. I use the United Kingdom Time Use Survey 2014–2015 to study how time spent with partners and children affects daily subjective well-being. Overall, I find that family time, couple time, and time alone with children contributes significantly to mothers’ and fathers’ well-being. I show that the activities that families share together mediate an important part of the enjoyment of time together but do not entirely explain this association. This suggests that beyond what families do together, families enjoy being together. I find that fathers enjoy family time more than mothers do. I demonstrate that the unequal division of labour during family time explains this discrepancy. I conclude by discussing the recent transformations of intimate relationships.


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.


Author(s):  
Thi Truong An Hoang ◽  
Andreas Knabe

Abstract We use nationally representative data from the UK Time-Use Survey 2014/2015 to investigate how a person’s employment status is related to time use and cognitive and affective dimensions of subjective well-being. We do not find clear indications that employed and unemployed persons experience different average levels of emotional well-being when they engage in the same kinds of activities. For the employed, working belongs to one of the least enjoyable activities of their day. They also spend a large share of their time at work and on work-related activities. The unemployed, instead, spend more time on leisure and more enjoyable activities. When looking at duration-weighted average affective well-being over the entire waking time of the day, the unemployed experience, on average, more enjoyment than the employed. For the employed, the more hours they have to work on a specific day, the lower the average enjoyment they experience on that day. Differentiating the analyses by weekdays and weekends supports the finding that being able to freely allocate one’s non-work time is associated with higher levels of affective well-being. In line with previous studies on cognitive well-being, we find that the unemployed report substantially lower levels of life satisfaction than the employed.


Author(s):  
Ieva Norkiene ◽  
Lina Jovarauskaite ◽  
Monika Kvedaraite ◽  
Encarl Uppal ◽  
Mandeep Kaur Phull ◽  
...  

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant effect on healthcare globally. Additional pressure created by coronavirus adversely affected the mental health and psychological well-being of healthcare workers, leading many to question their desire and willingness to continue working in healthcare. This study aimed to identify predictors for career change ideation among healthcare professionals in two countries; Lithuania and the United Kingdom amid the coronavirus pandemic. In total, 610 healthcare professionals from Lithuania and the UK (285 and 325, respectively) participated in a survey from May to August 2020. Psychological distress and psychological well-being were measured using the self-report scales “DASS-21” and “WHO-5”. Almost half of the sample (49.2%), 59.6% and 40.0% in Lithuanian and the UK, respectively, exhibited career change ideation, the country effect was significant (AOR = 2.21, p < 0.001). Stronger ideation to leave healthcare was predicted by higher levels of depression (AOR = 1.10, p = 0.005), stress (AOR = 1.10, p = 0.007), anxiety surrounding inadequate personal protective equipment (AOR = 2.27, p = 0.009), and lower psychological well-being scores (AOR = 1.10, p = 0.007). We conclude that psychosocial support must be provided for healthcare professionals to prevent burnout and loss of staff amid the pandemic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-29
Author(s):  
L. Samarska ◽  
◽  
N.M. Sas ◽  

The choice of the article’s topic is conditioned by the necessity to develop happiness management (such as knowledge management, time management, etc.). With considerable attention to the definition of “happiness”, the analysis of recent publications reveals that it is crucial to understand the deep foundations of happiness, create a typology, reveal the basic principles of different types of understanding of happiness, which was chosen as the topic research. Theoretical approaches to the definition of “happiness” are chosen sociology of imagination of G. Durand, the theory of archetypes of C. Jung, and the theory of images and dreams of G. Bachelard. In the context of this system of views, the idea of happiness is the result of a free play of the imagination, which, while being on the path from past to future, is transformed, revealed, comes accurate as a result of previous collective and individual intermediate ideas, and is enriched and concretised by individual people, social groups, individuals. The mythos of happiness across nations and people differs in the way, method, and tools of individuation, the discovery of the Self. The anthropological tract of happiness has an end to its existence. It is determined by the cessation of existence, the life of nations and individuals. The desire to experience pleasure (according to Freud), the desire to rise (according to Durand) are reflexive, which determines the physiological basis of happiness. Representations of happiness determine priorities, coordinate the direction of thinking, actions, reactions to external circumstances, and choose ways to achieve happiness. This is done through the transcendental function (according to Jung) – a psychological function that arises from the connection of the content of the unconscious with the content of consciousness. Achieving happiness allows one to strengthen the subjectivity and reveal their uniqueness, which allows them to identify typological features (archetypes) of behavioural reactions of people based on individual and group ideas about happiness. The authors reveal the basic foundations of such archetypes of happiness as hedonism, eudemonia, “rat racing”, nihilism, subjective well-being.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Mckay

In this paper a paradox is revealed in the politics of well-being over the means and ends of happiness. That paradox, in brief, is that although happiness is argued to be the ultimate end of all governmentality, in order to serve as that end, it first needs to be translated into a means for bolstering the economy, for only that way can a teleology of happiness gain a foothold in a world which prioritizes economic growth as an end in itself. To show this the paper gives a history of subjective well-being (SWB) research, and contrasts it with the politics of happiness in the UK, where SWB has in the past decade been translated into a discourse around the psychological wealth of the nation via the concepts of mental capital (MC) and mental well-being (MWB).


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