Friday, July 11, 2008
"It’s the drink" was one theory
In their paper "Well-Being, Insecurity and the Decline of American Job Satisfaction", Blancflower and Oswald report that well-being is higher among Ireland than in any other ´advanced nation.´ Furthermore, Ireland and Sweden are the least-stressed countries in the European Union. Thanks is given in the acknowledgements to numerous Irish journalists who proposed that ‘it’s the drink’ was one theory.
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5 comments:
im not sure what you can infer about Ireland being at the top of a job satisfaction survey. Ireland always scores very highly in well-being and satisfaction surveys e.g. we have, in many studies (e.g. Geary WP 2007-7), the highest self-rated health despite being way off the top in terms of objective measures. The Irish are arguably dispositionally optimistic when it comes to answering these questions partly because of low expectations built up through history.
Does this mean that cross-country comparisons are in general useless? And why stop there? Maybe comparisons between the sexes,age groups and so on are similarly meaningless?
I'm only asking.
not that they are meaningless, only that they may not be identified for self-reports unless you know how different groups are responding to the question. Much of the literature is finding that within cultures, the use of self-reports and self-ratings can be used reasonably well to make comparisons between genders etc., but that between cultures the differential thresholds lead to skewed conclusions if you do not know what the thresholds are. See Gary King's website on vignettes. he has a video there that goes through all this - very useful
[a href="http://gking.harvard.edu/vign/"]vignettes[/a]
vignettes
doh!
How does this work? So you have to make an identifying assumption that comparisons with a particular group are valid (tall male graduates 25-30 years etc) & then use vignettes to fix the thresholds?
What if you look in the wrong place e.g. ignore the crucial role of handedness? Say the relevant group is defined by an unobservable? E.g. there are moaners out there but we don't know who they are?
Or do you start with the vignettes & infer the comparable groups from that?
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