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Family, School, and Community Correlates of Children’s Subjective Well-being: An International Comparative Study

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Abstract

The primary purposes of this study are twofold: to examine how family, school, and community factors are related to children’s subjective well-being; and to examine the patterns of the relationships between family, school, and community variables and children’s subjective well-being across nations. We use the data from the pilot study of the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being for our analysis. We use multiple regression and multilevel methods in the study. We find that family, school, and community lives all significantly affect the levels of children’s subjective well-being. We also find that family, school, and community lives of children are important predictors of subjective well-being even after controlling for the country-specific cultural and contextual factors. We find that the economic variables of GDP and inequality are not significant factors predicting children’s subjective well-being. Rather it is the nature of children’s relationships with immediate surrounding environments, such as frequency of family activities, frequency of peer activities, and neighborhood safety, are most consistently related to the levels of children’s subjective well-being across the nations.

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Notes

  1. The 12 year old dataset gave the largest number of countries and the most complete set of variables for the analysis. Only 10 countries participated in the survey of 8 year olds. The main dependent variable used in the study is GDSI. The 12 year questionnaire had the most complete set of GDSI scale.

  2. Because the classes in which the majority of the children are in the targeted age groups were selected as sampling units for the survey, the actual age of some children in the selected classes was not 12.

  3. Although the ISCWeB data provide school identification information of the child, 3-level model was not employed because information on school characteristics was not collected in the surveys.

  4. It should be noted that our effective sample size for multilevel analysis is relatively small. A small number of groups could lead to biased outcomes in the multilevel analysis (Maas and Hox 2005). For example, small sample size could lead to a situation where standard error are biased downward and researchers overstate the level of their significance tests. However, the literature on multilevel analysis gives varying rules of thumb in terms of the minimum number of groups, ranging from 10 to 30 or even more (Stegmueller 2013). There are also several studies that used a small number of groups (Normand and Zou 2002; Steenbergen and Jones 2002). Furthermore, A Baysian approach, which we employed in this analysis, could be robust and yields considerably conservative tests when using a small number of groups in multilevel analysis (Stegmueller 2013).

  5. In the analysis, we also examined context-free measures such as OLS (overall life satisfaction) and SLSS (student life satisfaction scale). In the multiple regression model with pooled dataset, SLSS had similar results with GDSI but the r-square was decreased from .591 to .495. In the same analysis using OLS, which was not asked in Spain, it also has similar outcome with GDSI, but explanatory power decreased by almost half to .266. Despite explanatory power differences from scale to scale, we conclude that family, school, and community variables affect children’s subjective well-being consistently using different measures of subjective well-being. The results with either SLSS or OLS are available from the authors upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Welfare, Seoul National University, Gwanak-gu, Gwanak-ro 1, Seoul, 151-746, South Korea

    Bong Joo Lee

  2. Social Welfare Research Center, Seoul National University, Gwanak-gu, Gwanak-ro 1, Seoul, 151-746, South Korea

    Min Sang Yoo

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  1. Bong Joo Lee
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  2. Min Sang Yoo
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Correspondence to Bong Joo Lee.

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Lee, B.J., Yoo, M.S. Family, School, and Community Correlates of Children’s Subjective Well-being: An International Comparative Study. Child Ind Res 8, 151–175 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-014-9285-z

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