MENTAL HEALTH AND LIFE SATISFACTION OF YOUNG AUSTRALIANS: THE ROLE OF FAMILY BACKGROUND *

Aydogan Ulker ()

Australian Economic Papers, 2008, vol. 47, issue 2, pages 199-218

Abstract: This paper uses the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to investigate the factors that influence young Australians' mental health and life satisfaction, with an emphasis upon the role of family background. It also explores male and female differences concerning those background effects. The results indicate a particularly significant negative association between parental divorce and well-being, and suggest that the timing of divorce matters. Distinguishing the samples by gender shows that this relationship remains significant only for females. Past living arrangements consistently turn out to be statistically insignificant whether the sample used is the total, males or females. The current living arrangements, however, appear to be significantly associated with both mental health and life satisfaction of males. Adding potentially confounding characteristics to our basic regression, which includes only the family background variables, suggests that some of the 'aggregate' effects of family background might work indirectly through the mediating variables such as education or lifestyles, though most of them remain direct. Among those, marital status, education, labour market experience and lifestyles seem to be the major factors explaining the dispersion in well-being of young Australians. Income and wealth, on the other hand, have only a minor impact. Copyright 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/University of Adelaide and Flinders University.

Date: 2008

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8454.2008.00341.x link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ausecp:v:47:y:2008:i:2:p:199-218

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0004-900X

Access Statistics for this article

Australian Economic Papers is edited by Daniel Leonard

More articles in Australian Economic Papers from Blackwell Publishing
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().