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Are more equal societies 'better' societies? This article addresses the question as to whether and why income inequality lowers the degree of Europeans' subjective well-being. While in broad international comparisons typically no clear-cut link between income inequality and (un)happiness exists, we can demonstrate that Europeans are somewhat less happy in more unequal places. We further discuss and empirically test three explanations as to why Europeans are inequality-averse, namely (dis)trust, status anxiety, and perceived conflicts. Each of these three potential mediators is hypothesized to be shaped by the extent of a nation's income inequality, and in turn to result in lower subjective well-being. A multilevel mediation analysis with data from the European Quality of Life Survey 2007 for 30 countries reveals that distrust and status anxiety are important mediators of inequality aversion, whereas perceived conflict is not. We can further show that trust is the crucial mediator among affluent societies, whereas status anxiety is crucial among the less affluent societies. The results are discussed with reference to the Spirit Level theory developed by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.

Findings from a 14 site mixed methods study of over 1500 youth globally support four propositions that underlie a more culturally and contextually embedded understanding of resilience: 1) there are global, as well as culturally and contextually specific aspects to young people’s lives that contribute to their resilience; 2) aspects of resilience exert differing amounts of influence on a child’s life depending on the specific culture and context in which resilience is realized; 3) aspects of children’s lives that contribute to resilience are related to one another in patterns that reflect a child’s culture and context; 4) tensions between individuals and their cultures and contexts are resolved in ways that reflect highly specific relationships between aspects of resilience. The implications of this cultural and contextual understanding of resilience to interventions with at-risk populations are discussed.

This article discusses the determinants and the development of public concern for the state of the natural environment. First, we review some theoretical approaches that try to explain individual as well as cross-national differences in environmental attitudes. Particularly, we discuss Inglehart's theory of post-materialism, Dunlap and Mertig's globalization explanation, and the prosperity hypothesis. Second, we test these hypotheses by applying multilevel analysis to the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) data from the years 1993 and 2000. The results support, above all, the prosperity hypothesis. Individuals with higher relative income within countries display higher levels of environmental concern than their compatriots, and additionally, more concern is reported in wealthier countries than in poorer nations. The results indicate that environmental concern is also closely associated with post-materialistic attitudes and various socio-demographic variables. Comparing the environmental concern measured in the ISSP in 1993 with that in 2000 shows that environmental concern has more or less stabilized since the early 1990s in the countries under scrutiny.

This article explores the development of concepts related to the 'quality of employment' in the academic literature in terms of their definition, methodological progress and ongoing policy debates. Over time, these concepts have evolved from simple studies of job satisfaction towards more comprehensive measures of job and employment quality, including the International Labour Organization's concept of 'Decent Work' launched in 1999. This article compares the parallel development of quality of employment measures in the European Union with the ILO's Decent Work agenda and concludes that the former has advanced much further due to more consistent efforts to generate internationally comparable data on labour markets, which permit detailed measurements and international comparisons. In contrast, Decent Work remains a very broadly defined concept, which is impossible to measure across countries. We conclude by proposing three important differences between these two scenarios that have lead to such diverging paths: the lack of availability of internationally comparable data, the control over the research agenda by partisan social actors, and a prematurely mandated definition of Decent Work that is extremely vague and all-encompassing.

We present a study of the dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity for 26 countries with a Christian heritage, based on the 1998 and 2008 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Religion survey, using both exploratory and multi-group confirmatory factor analyses. The results of the exploratory factor analysis showed that three factors, common to Christian and religiously unaffiliated respondents, could be extracted from our initially selected items and suggested the testing of four different three-factor models using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. For the model with the best fit and measurement invariance properties, we labeled the three resulting factors as \"Beliefs in afterlife and miracles\", \"Belief and importance of God\" and \"Religious involvement.\" The first factor is measured by four items related to the Supernatural Beliefs Scale (SBS-6); the second by three items related to belief in God and God's perceived roles as a supernatural agent; and the third one by three items with the same structure found in previous cross-cultural analyses of religiosity using the European Values Survey (ESS) and also by belief in God. Unexpectedly, we found that one item, belief in God, cross-loaded on to the second and third factors. We discussed possible interpretations for this finding, together with the potential limitations of the ISSP Religion questionnaire for revealing the structure of religiosity. Our tests of measurement invariance across gender, age, educational degree and religious (un)affiliation led to acceptance of the hypotheses of metric- and scalar-invariance for these groupings (units of analysis). However, in the measurement invariance tests across the countries, the criteria for metric invariance were met for twenty-three countries only, and partial scalar invariance was accepted for fourteen countries only. The present work shows that the exploration of large multinational and cross-cultural datasets for studying the dimensionality and invariance of social constructs (in our case, religiosity) yields useful results for cross-cultural comparisons, but is also limited by the structure of these datasets and the way specific items are coded.

Why are some nations more religious than others? This article proposes a multilevel framework in which country differences in religious attendance are explained by contextual, individual, and cross-level interaction effects. Hypotheses from different theories are simultaneously tested with data from 60 nations obtained from the European/World Values Surveys. Multilevel logistic regression analyses show that religious regulation in a country diminishes religious attendance and that there are only small negative effects of people's own education and average educational level of the country. Religious attendance is strongly affected by personal and societal insecurities and by parental and national religious socialization and level of urbanization. These theories explain 75% of the cross-national variation in religious attendance. Adapted from the source document.

Applying the values construct in the social sciences has suffered from the absence of an agreed-upon conception of basic values, of the content & structure of relations among these values, & of reliable methods to measure them. This article presents data from over 70 countries, using two different instruments, to validate a theory intended to fill part of this gap. It concerns the basic values that individuals in all cultures recognize. The theory identifies 10 motivationally distinct values & specifies the dynamics of conflict & congruence among them. These dynamics yield a structure of relations among values common to culturally diverse groups, suggesting a universal organization of human motivations. Individuals & groups differ in the priorities they assign to these values. The article examines sources of individual differences in value priorities & behavioral & attitudinal consequences that follow from holding particular value priorities. In doing so, it considers processes through which values are influenced & through which they influence action. Tables, Figures, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

Objective. This study investigates, from a cross-national perspective, the determinants of public willingness to make economic sacrifices for environmental protection. Departing from the argument that corrupt institutions diminish the potential for social cooperation, it argues that earlier studies fail to stress the effect of corruption and political trust on peoples attitudes. Methods. A multilevel regression analysis is performed using data from the International Social Survey Programme. Results. The study shows that the willingness to make economic sacrifices for environmental protection is affected by individual political trust while it is hard to actually disentangle any contextual effects of corruption from other contextual effects. Conclusion. Acknowledging the effects of political trust and corruption improves the discussion on country differences in willingness to make economic sacrifices for environmental protection.

The debate on the resurgence of income inequality in some advanced industrial societies has often focused on the impact of an increasingly integrated world economy, typified by growing capital mobility, heightened international competition, and an increase in migration. This study represents one of the first systematic, crossnational examinations of the role of globalization in the inequality 'U-turn.' Results indicate, on the one hand, that total inequality variation is principally affected by the % of the labor force in agriculture, followed by the institutional factors union density and decommodification, and only then by globalization. On the other hand, longitudinal variation in inequality, while still dominated by the % of the labor force in agriculture, is also principally affected by aspects of globalization, such as southern import penetration and direct investment outflow, and to a lesser extent by migration. In other words, globalization explains the longitudinal trend of increasing inequality that took place within many industrial countries better than it does crosssectional inequality differences among countries. 6 Tables, 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 126 References. (Original abstract - amended)

The Flourishing Scale (FS; Diener et al. in Soc Indic Res 97(2): 143–156, 2010) was developed to assess psychological flourishing, which can be conceived of as a social-psychological prosperity incorporating important aspects of human functioning. This study takes the FS, which has previously been validated on convenience samples of students, and analyses the underlying structure, psychometric properties, and demographic norms using nationally-representative data from New Zealand's Sovereign Wellbeing Index (n = 10,009; Human Potential Centre in Sovereign Wellbeing Index: New Zealand's first measure of wellbeing. Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, 2013). Evidence for the reliability and validity of the FS is presented (Cronbach alpha) and its performance compared to other related scales and behaviors. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated the one factor structure of the 8-item FS. Contemporary population norms for the FS are reported, providing a much-needed benchmark for estimation of population health and permitting cross-study and international comparisons. The study provides further evidence that the FS is a valid and reliable brief summary measure of psychological functioning, suited for use with a wide range of age group and applications.