Social Ecological Measures of Interpersonal Destructiveness Impacting Child Subjective Mental Well-Being: Perceptions of 12-Year-Old Children in 14 Countries

Oliver Nahkur () and Dagmar Kutsar
Additional contact information
Oliver Nahkur: University of Tartu
Dagmar Kutsar: University of Tartu

Child Indicators Research, 2019, vol. 12, issue 1, No 19, 353-378

Abstract: Abstract The aim of this paper is to explore multilevel risk factors that impact child mental well-being in social ecological theoretical framework. We set the following research questions: (1) How are individual characteristics, their immediate environmental settings, and larger social and cultural contexts (multilevel risk factors) related to children’s subjective mental well-being; and (2) How do the impacts of multilevel risk factors of children’s subjective mental well-being vary across countries? We apply the conceptual scheme of the Societal Index of Interpersonal Destructiveness (SIID) by Nahkur et al. (Social Indicators Research, 133(2), 431–454, 2017) - inspired by social ecological framework to operationalise the research problem. Primarily, data are drawn from International Survey of Children’s Well-being (the sample of 12 year old children in 14 countries from 2013/14), and (multilevel) regression analyses are used. We found that interpersonal destructiveness measures, such as low life satisfaction, prior experience with destructive interpersonal conflict and subjective economic insecurity as individual factors, and poor parenting, poor relationship climate, fragile community as immediate environmental factors affect children’s subjective mental well-being negatively, even after controlling for the larger social and cultural context factors. As a main finding these associations were universal across the observed countries, however, with subjective economic insecurity as a notable exception. The influence of societal factors on children’s mental well-being stayed unclear as we used adult-driven data that cannot represent children’s opinions. In sum, children’s assessments reflect their direct and indirect interactions with different levels of social ecological environmental settings that are merged in their opinions at the individual level.

Keywords: Subjective well-being; Child subjective mental well-being; Societal Index of Interpersonal Destructiveness (SIID); Child social indicators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12187-018-9542-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:chinre:v:12:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1007_s12187-018-9542-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... f-life/journal/12187

DOI: 10.1007/s12187-018-9542-7

Access Statistics for this article

Child Indicators Research is currently edited by Asher Ben-Arieh

More articles in Child Indicators Research from Springer, The International Society of Child Indicators (ISCI)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().