Abstract
This paper examines the question of how social well-being, or quality of life, in Northern Ireland has changed through time from 1958 to 1998. After reviewing major economic trends and governmental policy affecting the region, we develop an overall measure of quality of life based on previous research into social well-being in Northern Ireland. We find that the ‘Troubles’ clearly impact the quality of life in Northern Ireland but not necessarily as broadly as one might suspect. The majority of the sixteen underlying indicators used for creating a measure of social well-being remain largely unaffected by the conflict and closely track increases in overall United Kingdom Gross Domestic Product. The remaining five measures of social well-being are significantly impacted by the conflict. The resulting measures of social well-being and some suggested uses for future research are then presented.
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Notes
Every effort has been made to insure consistency across years by using revised or corrected figures when available. Beyond this, the authors rely on the consistency and accuracy of the Central Statistical Office for the validity of the data. Since the number of reported offenses and the strength of the police force are directly related to the Troubles for the majority of this study, they have been dropped from Knox’s original list. The United Kingdom data (inflation figures) are taken from International Labor Organization statistics.
These groupings remain the same with or without rotation of the factors; however, this is easiest to see with the unrotated matrix. Therefore the unrotated matrix is shown. Furthermore, because the study tries to replicate Knox’s analysis as closely as possible within the data availability constraints, all variables are retained in the analyses regardless of their factor loadings. Dropping low loading variables could improve the amount of variance explained, but it would do so at the expense of theoretical reasons for the variables to be included.
Rotation is not possible with the extraction of a single factor.
Regrettably, while dividing the data into two subsets would be most desirable, the sixteen measures cannot be used to generate a single factor prior to 1974 because of a lack of data points compared to the number of variables, 14 years versus 16 variables. Therefore, while we know that the time series is ‘interrupted’ in 1973/1974, we are unable to conduct separate analyses on the before and after data.
Rotating the factors using a varimax rotation does not improve the interpretability of the two components. Therefore, the unrotated matrix is presented.
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Thomas, G.D., Jesse, N.G. Social Well-Being in Northern Ireland: A Longitudinal Study 1958–1998. Soc Indic Res 106, 199–212 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9808-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9808-7