PURPOSE Different countries have different goals for social welfare policy. Consequently, it is reasonable to expect different outcomes after certain events. This article examines changes in the economic well-being of elderly women at widowhood in the United States and Germany. DESIGN AND METHODS Longitudinal data from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the German Socioeconomic Panel...

Church attendance is associated with improved health and well-being among older adults, but older adults with functional limitations may have difficulty attending church services. This article examines differences in the association between functional limitations and church attendance in a sample of 987 elderly African American and white individuals. African American and white elderly people wi...

subjective well-being, generally through survey methods. A number of psychologists and social scientists have drawn upon this work recently to argue that the American model of relatively limited government and a dynamic market economy corrodes happiness, whereas Western European and Scandinavian-style social democracies promote it. This paper argues that happiness research in fact poses no thre...

One measure of social welfare in a society is the economic health of dependent populations, such as the elderly and children. The well-being of these two groups relative to the working-aged population indicates a distribution of income that promotes security at all stages of life. But what of a society that protects its aged much better than it protects its children? This anomalous situation oc...

The health and well-being consequences of social isolation and loneliness in old age are increasingly being recognised. The purpose of this scoping review was to take stock of the available evidence and to highlight gaps and areas for future research. We searched nine databases for empirical papers investigating the impact of social isolation and/or loneliness on a range of health outcomes in o...

The influence of early life, accumulation and social mobility on wellbeing in later life in the U.S. and England is investigated. Using cross-sectional data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), we estimate multivariate regressions of hedonic and eudemonic measures of wellbeing on these life course mechanisms, controlling for age, gender...

• Reducing gender inequality and empowering women, men, boys and girls is critical to the success of the BRACED Mercy Corps project and its ability to ‘improve the well-being of households, by building the absorptive, adaptive and transformative resilience capacities needed to manage the shocks and stresses of climate extremes and disasters at the individual, household, community and systems sc...

A welfare framework for the analysis of the spatial dimensions of sustainability is developed. It covers agglomeration effects, interregional trade, negative environmental externalities, and various land use categories. Themodel is used to compare rankings of spatial configurations according to evaluations based on social welfare and ecological footprint indicators. Five spatial configurations ...

We examine how environmental attitudes influence subjective well-being in urban China. We find that considering environmental protection important on its own has no effect on subjective wellbeing; however, those who consider environmental protection important and have a higher sense of collectivism or concern for others have a lower level of subjective well-being. We interpret this result as in...

Despite multiple axes of variation in defining wellbeing, the paper argues for the dominance of a 'components approach' in current research and practice. This approach builds on a well-established tradition within the social sciences of attending to categories whether for their identification, their value or their meanings and political resonance. The paper critiques the components approach and...