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The Association Between the Material Well-Being and the Subjective Well-Being of Children in 35 Countries

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Abstract

It is well established that child poverty has a profound, costly, and long-term impact on physical and mental health, educational attainment, and outcomes in adulthood. However, to date, while among adults a correlation between income and subjective well-being has been found, findings of such an association during childhood are mixed. This may be because the indicators available for both child poverty and subjective well-being have been limited – mainly to household incomes reported by adults and single measures of life satisfaction. This article explores the opportunities presented by the data collected in the third wave of Children’s Worlds, the school-based survey of children in 35 countries. The study employed a wider range of measures of material well-being, as well as subjective well-being, in terms of living standards in a larger range of countries. We have found that at both country comparative level, and within the country level, there is an association between material deprivation and some measures of subjective well-being, but the strength of the association varied between the country level and individual-level analyses, and across countries at the individual-level. At the macro-country level, the Family Affluence Scale was not significantly associated with most subjective well-being measures, while the deprivation scale, and a multi-dimensional measure that was developed in this paper, showed high correlations with overall life satisfaction and feelings of sadness. At the individual-level, the correlations were generally weak and varied between countries. We conclude with a discussion regarding possible explanations for these findings and their possible implications.

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Data is available in SPSS.

Notes

  1. Please note all tables shown refer to the 10-years-olds sample, unless it is stated differently in the title.

  2. In some versions this is a holiday abroad.

  3. This was tested using two methods: firstly the structure of the measure was examined using exploratory factor analysis: all variables were found to load onto a single factor; secondly we tested the reliability of the scale using Cronbach’s Alpha: together, the scale had a score of 0.95, with one variable – I have what I want in my life – not making a substantial contribution, but neither would its removal enhance the scale substantially (Cronbach’s Alpha without = 0.96, a real difference of 0.001 when rounding is taken into account).

  4. It should be noted the item ‘Things Life Excellent’ – was found to have somewhat diverse answering styles in different countries (Casas, 2020).

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Acknowledgements

The third wave of the Children’s Worlds survey was supported by the Jacobs Foundation.

Funding

The third wave of the Children’s Worlds survey was supported by the Jacobs Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Senior Lecturer At the Department of Social Work, Tel-Hai College, Upper Galilee, Israel

    Daphna Gross-Manos

  2. Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the University of York, York, UK

    Jonathan Bradshaw

Authors
  1. Daphna Gross-Manos
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  2. Jonathan Bradshaw
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Correspondence to Daphna Gross-Manos.

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Ethics Approval

Each participating country research team obtained needed ethical approval from the relevant academic institute, and the Ministry of Education if necessary.

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Parents and children were asked for consent in a procedure explained in the method section (consent letters are available in Hebrew).

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 14 Ranked order of mean Overall Life Satisfaction (OLS)
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Table 15 Subjective Well-Being (SWBS)
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Table 16 Positive Affect – Feeling Happy
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Table 17 Negative Affect – Feeling Sad
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Gross-Manos, D., Bradshaw, J. The Association Between the Material Well-Being and the Subjective Well-Being of Children in 35 Countries. Child Ind Res 15, 1–33 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-021-09860-x

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