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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
Interests: synthesis of statistical indicators; quality of life; wellbeing
Interests: synthesis of statistical indicators; quality of life; wellbeing; multivariate statistics
Interests: Health Economics, Indicators, Social Statistics, Health Statistics, Big Data, Research Analysis, Data Analysis, Quantitative Analysis, Research Methodology, Data Collection
Interests: synthetic indicators; multidimensional ordinal data; partially ordered data
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 MaggianoLeading 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
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.