Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

Wir wollten auch die deutschsprachige Methoden-Community nochmals auf unsere Session am ISA World Congress 2014 in Yokohama/Japan (siehe unten) hinweisen. Wir greifen das derzeit boomende Thema Wellbeing auf und  wollen uns primär mit den methodologischen Herausforderungen in internationalen Umfragen auseinandersetzen. Die Deadline zur Einreichung von Abstracts endet am 30. September 2013, also kommenden Montag. Der Link zur Einreichung von Sessions ist der folgende:

https://isaconf.confex.com/isaconf/wc2014/rc/papers/index.cgi, Sie finden unsere Session am Ende der Liste des Angebots der RC 33.

Beste Grüße,

Wolfgang Aschauer und Martin Weichbold

Well-being and Quality of Life. Methodological Challenges for Cross-National Surveys Session Organizers Wolfgang ASCHAUER, University of Salzburg, Austria, Wolfgang.Aschauer@sbg.ac.at Martin WEICHBOLD, University of Salzburg, Austria, Martin.Weichbold@sbg.ac.at

Research on subjective wellbeing has gained enormous importance during the last years. It seems that we witness a fundamental turn from measures of economic progress to multidimensional measures of quality of life and societal wellbeing as well as a shift from objective indicators to a higher relevance of subjective measures. Thirdly, high efforts in the development of new concepts for cross-national comparisons are clearly visible (e.g. National Accounts of Wellbeing of the nef foundation, “Your better life index” of the OECD). Despite this boom of subjective wellbeing measures, also with regard to cross-national research, the analysis of the comparability of these approaches still remains in its infancy.

It seems to be common to take the cross-cultural equivalence of the concepts for granted, to neglect the use of statistical methods of equivalence testing and to widely ignore critical approaches questioning the cross-cultural validity of wellbeing in general. Culture-specific concepts – representing a counter-trend in wellbeing-research – highlight that there is no universally accepted general theory on wellbeing and certain components of the construct are culturally sensitive. Locally emerging concepts (such as the GNH approach of Bhutan or the ONS concept of GB) are considered more valid than approaches with the intent of being universally relevant.

Picking up these contemporary developments and debates in subjective wellbeing research this session addresses three main research questions:

    If we decide to conceptualize comparable wellbeing measures, how should we address the methodological challenge of achieving cross-cultural validity?

    How can we assess the cross-national equivalence of existing concepts of wellbeing?

    Is it possible to construct new comparable indicators of quality of life and societal wellbeing based on survey data and subjective perceptions of the citizens?

The session aims at participants who work in the field of Wellbeing research and use cross-national survey data. We welcome speakers who try to develop new conceptual frameworks of wellbeing and quality of life which can be applied to cross-national research or who highlight the challenges of comparability of wellbeing approaches.