Applied Research in Quality of Life

The extraordinary COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most severe disruptions of human life since the end of World War II, even in rich and industrialized countries like Germany. The introduction of a rather comprehensive “lockdown” and the restriction of multiple basic civil rights have affected the population in many areas of life, like employment, economic prosperity, health and trust in public institutions. The question arises how life satisfaction is influenced by these measures in detail and whether there are interactions between institutional trust, life satisfaction and time of crisis. Fixed-effect regression analyses using German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) data demonstrate that life satisfaction has fallen sharply after the onset of the crisis and that interaction effects with institutional trust are present. Individuals with low levels of pre-crisis trust in institutions like the government, courts or the media report a stronger decrease of satisfaction than individuals with higher levels of trust. We believe that these results are relevant to explain the role of institutions in times of crisis and might serve as foundations for interventions to strengthen trust and increase overall satisfaction.

The relationship between housing and subjective well-being is receiving growing attention in social research and social policy. However, the mechanisms among housing and subjective well-being, and the mediating role of housing factors between income and subjective well-being was unclear in previous studies. This study aims to investigate the relationship between income, housing, and subjective well-being, and their interacting effects among housing dimensions in Hong Kong, an example of a global city with a dense population and unaffordable housing. A random sample survey of 1480 adult participants in Hong Kong was used for the analysis. Structural equation modelling was applied in studying the path relationships among the key variables. Subjective well-being was predicted by income and housing factors, including housing expense, living density, housing environment problems, and housing satisfaction. The results showed that the impact of income on subjective well-being was partially mediated by housing factors. In group analysis by housing tenure, the housing factors exerted a larger influence on the private rental housing group. This study contributed to highlighting the role of housing factors in happiness studies and the importance of the interaction among housing factors and housing tenures in analyses. The implications of these results and their limitations are discussed.

The present study examines the relationship between wellbeing and work performance in a twotime model. The model was based on the happy-productive worker hypothesis. Labour wellbeing (Time 1, T1) was measured with three constructs: job satisfaction, personal satisfaction, and organizational commitment, and showed good one dimensional adjustment in the second-order confirmatory factor analysis performed. We use a stratified sampling strategy, controlling for sex, age and whether workers were employed in the public or private sector. Of the 235 employees analysed in T1, 205 responded in Time 2 (T2). Results obtained through SEM analysis establish a positive and significant relationship between positive wellbeing and job performance. Likewise, job satisfaction and organizational commitment were the variable that most influenced the unidimensional welfare construct (0.902, p < 0.001 and 0.750, p < 0.001, respectively). Personal satisfaction showed a lower value (0.234, p < 0.01), and was the only one of the three variables that was context-free level. The article looks at the theoretical and professional implications of the results.

Many scholars and commentators have written on ways to counteract acts of terrorism initiated by Islamist militants associated with Jihadist groups operating predominantly in the Middle East and North Africa Region (hereafter the MENA region). Most of what has been published in the academic literature with respect to slowing, eventually stopping, the rate of Islamist-inspired terrorism has focused on short-term public safety solutions to the problem. In this paper, we build a quality-of-life model to address the drivers of Jihadist terrorism and deduce the underlying factors that contribute to counterterrorism programs directly from our understanding of these drivers. Specifically, we provide suggestive evidence to show increased incidence of Jihadist terrorism is mostly motivated by increased negative sentiment of aggrieved Muslims toward their more affluent Western neighbors. This negative sentiment is influenced by a host of quality-of-life factors: economic ill-being factors (e.g., income disparities, poverty, and unemployment; and disparities in technological innovation), political ill-being factors (e.g., authoritarian tribal and exclusionary regimes), religious ill-being factors (e.g., increased Islamic religiosity, and lack of secularism), globalization and media ill-being factors (e.g., the global media), and cultural ill-being factors (e.g., perceived decadence of Western culture, and Western prejudice and discrimination). More effective counterterrorism strategies are deduced directly from understanding how these quality-of-life factors influence increased incidence of Jihadist terrorism.

Despite the importance of social-emotional skills on personal future quality-of-life, little is known about educational inequalities in social-emotional skills. To address the gap, the current study examines the relationship between student socioeconomic status and social-emotional skills and whether schools exacerbate or mitigate socioeconomic disparities in social-emotional skills. Using the OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills database of 7,246 Chinese students aged 10 and 15, we found that socioeconomic status positively influenced social-emotional skills and that school resources mitigated their relationship. Findings suggested that school resources could compensate for the adverse effects of low socioeconomic status on students’ social-emotional skills, supporting the resource substitution hypothesis. Practical implications and limitations were discussed.

Extensive scholarly debate still exists on the determinants of local policy decisions. Although many studies have explained how political, economic, institutional, and demographic factors influence local policy decisions, they have rarely applied the concept of QoL in existing public administration and policy literature. To examine the impact of QoL on local policy decisions, this study tests the relationships between QoL and local budgetary decisions, based on Peterson’s (1981) scheme that divides policy into three areas: developmental, allocational, and redistributive. Using local government expenditures and citizen surveys data from 167 municipalities in the U.S., this study finds that community QoL is a critical factor in all of the three policy spending areas. It also confirms that the impact of QoL on local spending is moderated differently across the three areas by city income levels. The findings may help local government scholars and practitioners to better understand complex and dynamic citizen needs, which in turn may result in more responsive policy decisions.

The paper describes the development of the Portuguese version of the Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale and the examination of its psychometric properties. A sample of 367 Portuguese students completed the Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS; Huebner in Sch Psychol Int 12:231–240, 1991a), Children’s Hope Scale (CHS; Synder in J Pediatr Psychol 22:399–421, 1997), Global Self-Worth Sub-scale (Harter, S. (1985). Manual for the self-perception profile for children. Denver: University of Denver) and Mental Health Inventory-5 (MHI-5; Berwick et al. in Medical Care 29:169–176, 1991). The first step includes translation, back-translation, inspection for lexical equivalence and content validity, and cognitive debriefing. Then we considered reliability, factor structure, and criterion-related validity. The validation process of the Portuguese SLSS version shows psychometric properties similar to the English language SLSS, suggesting that it measures the same construct in the same way. Implications of these findings are discussed.