A Simplified Indicator of Social Well-Being in the United States: Examining the Ecological Impact of Family Formation within a County Level Framework

• Published in: Social indicators research Vol. 108; no. 3; pp. 421 - 440
• Main Author: Porter, Jeremy R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer 01.09.2012; Springer Netherlands; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Autocorrelation; Census Figures; Censuses; Communities; Community; Community Characteristics; Community Relations; Correlation; Counties; Crime; Crime prevention; Crime Rates; Criminal statistics; Criminals; Data Analysis; Delinquency; Demography; Ecological effects; Environmental Factors; Evidence; Families & family life; Family; Family Structure; Health; Health Promotion; Human development; Human ecology; Human ecology and demography; Human Geography; Hypotheses; Inferences; Interpersonal Relationship; Life expectancy; Longevity; Marital status; Marriage; Marriage rates; Microeconomics; Neighborhoods; Nuptiality; Public Health; Quality of life; Quality of Life Research; Sexuality. Marriage. Family relations; Social Development; Social disorganization; Social Indicators; Social Influences; Social psychology; Social Sciences; Social well being; Sociology; Sociology of the family. Age groups; Sociometric Techniques; Spatial analysis; Spatial models; Statistical Analysis; Studies; U.S.A; Well Being; Wellbeing; United States Of America; United States > US; USA; Well-being; Spatial analysis; Family; Human development; Marriage; County; Social disorganization; Social well-being; Marriage Rate; Ecological impact; Social Indicator
• ISSN: 0303-8300; 1573-0921
• DOI: 10.1007/s11205-011-9884-8

In 1995, a study entitled "Does Marriage Matter?" was published by Linda Waite in the journal of Demography, which was concerned with the direction of such causal relationships. While Waite's examination of the causal relationships associated with marriage, and most other analyses of this type, is primarily concerned with the individual level effects of marriage on a variety of outcomes, little is understood concerning the ecological effect of community marriage rates on levels of aggregate well-being. This study aims to contribute to this gap through the implementation of a recent conceptualization of social well-being as a multi-dimensional measure incorporating both biological, operationalized as average life expectancy, and social phenomena, operationalized as, community level crime rates (Raphael, Making the links: what do health promotion, crime prevention, and social development have in common? in 2004). It is important to understand such aggregate level effects in the face of the existing literature, which relies heavily on relational associations which could be subject to ecological fallacy. Analytic techniques incorporate Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis and spatial regression techniques, due to the high existence of spatial autocorrelation often evident in census data, as a way of understanding the effect of the aggregate level marriage rate on the constructed social well being indicator.