1. Personal & Social Well-being:
Creating indicators for a flourishing Europe

50-item module

Proposal Abstract:

It has become customary to judge the quality of a society by the use of objective indicators, predominantly socio-economic ones.  Yet in most developed nations in Europe and elsewhere, increases in income, health and education have not produced comparable increases in happiness or life satisfaction.  To address this issue, this proposal seeks to evaluate the success of European countries at promoting the personal and social well-being of their citizens.  Whilst much has been learnt from introducing subjective measures of global happiness or life satisfaction into survey research, significant recent progress in the development of high quality subjective measures of personal and social well-being is not being fully utilised, and should be systematically developed across Europe.  We suggest that domain-specific measures, such as income, family and work satisfaction, require further understanding both in terms of their causes and effects.  Most importantly, we argue that the next generation of advancement in the field requires us to look beyond 'hedonic' measures of well-being (feeling and evaluation) to 'eudaimonic' measures of capabilities and functionings since these are associated with sustainable rather than transient well-being.  This module represents the first systematic attempt to create a set of policy-relevant national well-being accounts.

Team:

Felicia Huppert,  University of Cambridge, UK
Andrew Clark, Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques, France
Bruno Frey, University of Zürich, Switzerland
Nic Marks, New Economics Foundation, UK
Johannes Siegrist, Düsseldorf University, Germany

2.  The Timing of Life: 
The organisation of the life course in Europe

50-item module

Proposal Abstract:

The module aims at furthering our understanding of the views of European citizens on the organisation of the life course and of their strategies to influence and plan their own lives.  Three main research topics concerning the organisation of the life course are to be studied in the set of proposed questions: 1) to what extent do citizens perceive the life course as a structured sequence of life stages, and which events mark the transition from one stage to the other?; 2) do social norms concerning the life course exist, and if so, to what extent are these norms backed by sanctions?; 3) what are the expectations and capacities of citizens concerning life course planning?  Based on life course theory, we expect that the three questions have heterogeneous answers between societies with different cultures and institutional settings, and that there is an important intra-societal variation too.  Besides its primary scientific relevance, the proposed topics relate to recent public debates about the (re-)structuring of welfare states.

Team:

Francesco Billari, Università Bocconi, Italy
Gunhild Hagestad, Agder University College, Norway
Aart Liefbroer, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute and Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Zsolt Spéder, Hungarian Central Statistical Office, Hungary