Special Issue "Indicators of Social Sustainability and Wellbeing"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Geography and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2021.

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Filomena Maggino
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Statistics, Sapienza University of Rome, I-00185 Rome, Italy
Interests: synthesis of statistical indicators; quality of life; wellbeing
Dr. Leonardo Salvatore Alaimo
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Italian National Institute of Statistics—ISTAT, 00184 Rome, Italy
Interests: synthesis of statistical indicators; quality of life; wellbeing; multivariate statistics
Dr. Enrico Di Bella
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Political Sciences of the University of Genoa
Interests: Health Economics, Indicators, Social Statistics, Health Statistics, Big Data, Research Analysis, Data Analysis, Quantitative Analysis, Research Methodology, Data Collection
Dr. Marco Fattore
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Statistics and Quantitative Methods, University of Milano-Bicocca, 20126 Milano, Italy
Interests: synthetic indicators; multidimensional ordinal data; partially ordered data
Dr. Matteo Corsi
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Economy and Quantitative Methods, University of Genoa, 16125 Genoa, Italy.
Interests: Public Economics; Quantitative social research

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues, 

The measurement of human wellbeing is a challenging endeavor that has kept generations of scholars and scientists busy for the better part of the last two hundred years. For most of that timespan, the prevailing intuition was that the measurement of welfare generated by the ability of income to provide for human wants and needs was reasonable enough as an approximation of wellbeing. By the 1930s, the emergence of the first modern models of national accounting had essentially provided the framework for what is today the state of the art in the measurement of income, and national accountants and economists had started to formalize its complicated relationship with the notion of “economic welfare”. Since then, however, it has become more and more apparent to social scientists that narrow definitions of welfare are insufficient to provide a meaningful picture of human wellbeing. First, the idea that a proper measurement of income should measure how much we can consume in a time period without compromising the possibility of future consumption introduced the notion of economic sustainability. Then, in the 1970s, a number of approaches convergently called into question the existing measures of income, for failing to take into account important aspects of human welfare; the project to aggregate the measurement of all that is meaningful for wellbeing into a single measure, for enforcing the reduction of all welfare aspects to a monetary measure; the notion that economic sustainability can stand in isolation from social and environmental concerns and, finally, the individualistic frame of observation, for failing to capture the social and relational aspects of wellbeing. The 1960s social indicators movement was part of such a process and, with its attempt to identify and aggregate key social measures in a small number of powerful social indicators to complement income, it now represents one of the most active areas of research on the sustainability of the various aspects of social environments. This Special Issue is intended to include methodological and applied works—including reviews—that address the issue of indicators of social sustainability and wellbeing.

Dr. Filomena Maggiano
Leading Guest Editor
Dr. Leonardo Salvatore Alaimo
Dr. Enrico Di Bella
Dr. Marco Fattore
Dr. Matteo Corsi
Assistant Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • statistical indicators
  • sustainability
  • wellbeing
  • quality of life

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

Article
Housing for Sustainable Societies. Children′s Perception and Satisfaction with Their House in Countries around the World
Sustainability 2021, 13(16), 8779; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13168779 - 06 Aug 2021
Viewed by 425
Abstract
(1) Background: Adequate housing conditions and access to basic house amenities are fundamental human rights and indicators of individual wellbeing. The paper aims to present children’s perception regarding housing conditions and household goods and their impact on children’s overall satisfaction with their house. [...] Read more.
(1) Background: Adequate housing conditions and access to basic house amenities are fundamental human rights and indicators of individual wellbeing. The paper aims to present children’s perception regarding housing conditions and household goods and their impact on children’s overall satisfaction with their house. (2) Methods: We aim to determine the contribution of housing conditions and household goods on children’s satisfaction with their home in 31 countries worldwide. To capture differences in children’s satisfaction with their house based on their housing conditions, we analyzed models conducted on data from 10 lower- and upper-middle-income and 20 high-income countries. We used secondary analysis on data from the third wave of Children’s Worlds: International Survey of Children’s Well-Being (ISCWeb) (87,000 children, aged 10–12, worldwide). (3) Results: The results show that there is a link between the material conditions of the family and children’s satisfaction with the house they live in, and also that having a place to study and access to internet are the main factors related to housing that explain children’s satisfaction. (4) Conclusions: Children mostly appreciate the way housing setting and household goods contribute and ensure their proper development through the creation of a stimulating home learning environment. Results are helpful in setting future standards to increase children’s wellbeing and quality of life, and ensure adequate housing as one of the pillars of sustainable development. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Indicators of Social Sustainability and Wellbeing)
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Article
Assessment of Poverty by Municipalities in the Context of Population Ageing—The Case of Małopolskie Voivodeship
Sustainability 2021, 13(5), 2563; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13052563 - 27 Feb 2021
Viewed by 646
Abstract
This article undertakes the research problem of the assessment of the significance of poverty as a social challenge for local self-government units, and the differences in the assessment of the incidence of this phenomenon depending on the type of municipality. The authors also [...] Read more.
This article undertakes the research problem of the assessment of the significance of poverty as a social challenge for local self-government units, and the differences in the assessment of the incidence of this phenomenon depending on the type of municipality. The authors also analyse the relationships between the ageing of the population and the assessment of the extent of poverty by municipalities. It must be pointed out that the undertaken problem has not been a subject of in-depth analysis thus far. Hence, this article fills the identified research gap in this field. The empirical part is based on the results of our own research, conducted using the Computer-Assisted Web Interview (CAWI) method on a sample of 144 municipalities of the Małopolskie Voivodship (Poland). In order to verify whether there is a relationship between the researched qualitative variables, the chi-square test of independence was used. In order to determine the relationships occurring between the categories of variables characterising the scale of the incidence of poverty and the remaining variables, a correspondence analysis was conducted. The research enabled us to find the issue of poverty to be one of the most important social problems from the point of view of municipalities. It is also worth noting that the degree of ageing in the population has an impact on the assessment of poverty among the elderly. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Indicators of Social Sustainability and Wellbeing)
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Planned Papers

The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.

Title: A Critical View on the Measurement of Social Sustainability
Authors: Alberto Arcagni; Marco Fattore; Filomena Maggino; Giorgio Vittadini
Affiliation: Department University of Rome La Sapienza – Italy Department of Statistics and Quantitative Methods, University of Milano-Bicocca - Italy Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Rome La Sapienza – Italy Department of Statistics and Quantitative Methods, University of Milano-Bicocca - Italy
Abstract: In this position paper, we propose some critical reflections on the construction of indicators for the assessment and the measurement of social sustainability, seen as a complex process within evolving and unpredictable societies. We maintain that new data types and new statistical tools are needed, to provide policy-makers and stakeholders with a unitary, structural and faithful picture of sustainability, as opposed to the fragmented view conveyed by the typical habit of composing and juxtaposing a plethora of indicators of different nature and meaning. To this goal, any sensible synthesis of social sustainability data must overcome the aggregative paradigm, in favor of non-aggregative approaches which preserve, to the right extent, its soft and multi-faceted nature, reflecting the diversity of sustainability patterns existing within societies. We support these claims, working out and comparing examples of aggregative and non-aggregative synthetic indicators, on official data pertaining to Italy, and discussing their different informative power.

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