This paper empirically analyzes the impact that the spread of casino gambling has on social capital in communities throughout the United States. Social capital is a networking process that translates into an individual's effectiveness in the community and workplace, and binds communities together. Several recent studies have also demonstrated a…

An aggregated sample of students (n = 3407) from the University of Northern British Columbia covering 7 of the 8 years from 1998 to 2005 is analyzed to show the relative and combined explanatory power of some life domain (e.g., satisfaction with family relations) and university-related variables (e.g., satisfaction with UNBC instructors) on some…

This study adopts satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with specific life domains as indicators to analyse the relationships between the well-being of 12 to 16-year-old adolescents and some related constructs such as self-esteem, perceived control and perceived social support. Well-being indicators from a 2003 Spanish sample using an…

Temporary workers in Britain experience lower job quality. However, the proportion of employees on temporary contracts has fallen since a decade ago to just 5.5% in 2005. There have also been qualitative improvements. Many temporary workers now fall under the protection of the Fixed Term Employees' (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment)…

Trauer and Mackinnon (2001; Quality of life research 10, pp. 579-585) recently proposed that weighting satisfaction scores by importance ratings in measuring quality of life is undesirable and unnecessary. However, they didn't use empirical data to support their claim. In this study, different weighting algorithms developed by Cummins (1997;…

This paper aims at advancing the conceptualization of leisure as a contributor to quality of life (QOL) in an international and multicultural context, based on an extensive and critical review of literature on leisure and QOL from a global, international perspective. Given the central role of culture in conceptualizing this notion, this paper…

This study compares health status and quality of life assessments of first-year university students with those of their same-age working counterparts. Subjects and materials for each group were gathered in 1999 from two cross-sectional data sets from the Swedish region of Ostergotland, covering males and females aged 20-34 years. Subjects'…

South Korea is widely known as an Asian model of economic development and democratization. Yet until now, research has not shown whether the country's successful transition to democracy and market capitalism has enabled ordinary citizens to experience a life of happiness and satisfaction in their private and public lives. To address this question,…

The aim of this essay is to build a bridge between two intersecting areas of research, social indicators research on the one hand and health-related quality of life research on the other. The first substantive section of the paper introduces key concepts and definitions in the social indicators research tradition, e.g., social indicators,…

The Human Development Index (HDI) implicitly defines "human development" and ranks countries accordingly. To elucidate the HDI's meaning of "human development," the paper examines the sensitivity of the HDI to changes in its components, namely social indicators of education, longevity and standard of living. The HDI is next compared with two…

The WHOQOL-BREF is one of the cross-cultural and widely used measures for assessing health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Previous studies of the HRQOL using the WHOQOL-BREF mainly focused on adult; however, there has been less work carried out on assessing the HRQOL on early adolescence. The goal of this study was to examine the applicability…

In Germany, processes can be observed that have long been out of keeping with the principle of equality of opportunity. Unemployment is concentrated in the structurally weak peripheral areas, in Eastern Germany in particular; emigration of young and better-educated people to the West is not diminishing, but contrary to expectation is again on the…

The question of whether boys or girls (and young males and females) have been doing better in terms of their well-being in the United States has been a point of sometimes rancorous debate among feminist and other scholars in recent decades. But suprisingly little systematic empirical inquiry has been devoted to this question. The present study…

Unemployment and GDP are widely used as proxies for a broader concept of well-being in the European Union, especially at regional level. This paper asks whether such an approach is reasonable. Using data from a range of sources, it examines the association between unemployment, GDP and a number of alternative well-being indicators in five…

The relationship between spirituality and various dimensions of health and quality of life has been extensively examined during the past decade. Though several literature reviews have been conducted in an attempt to synthesize research findings pertaining to the relationship between spirituality and health, a meta-analysis of studies examining…