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Reasons for Homeostatic Failure in Subjective Wellbeing

Reasons for Homeostatic Failure in Subjective Wellbeing. Presentation to ACE12. A/Prof Robert Tanton, Dr. Itismita Mohanty, Dr. Anthony Hogan. Structure. Wellbeing and Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis in wellbeing A failure of homeostasis in wellbeing What affects homeostatic failure

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Reasons for Homeostatic Failure in Subjective Wellbeing

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  1. Reasons for Homeostatic Failure in Subjective Wellbeing Presentation to ACE12 A/Prof Robert Tanton, Dr. Itismita Mohanty, Dr. Anthony Hogan

  2. Structure • Wellbeing and Subjective Wellbeing • Homeostasis in wellbeing • A failure of homeostasis in wellbeing • What affects homeostatic failure • Future work

  3. Wellbeing • Wellbeing includes both objective conditions of life and subjective perceptions on life • Individual level, this includes the physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual aspects of life. • Broader level, this includes the social, material and natural environments surrounding each individual, and their interactions.

  4. Understanding ‘Wellbeing’ • An extension of psychological research on wellbeing and life satisfaction for individuals. • Uses measures of subjective wellbeing: questions based on a psychological scale. • The question asked in the HILDA is: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life?” with a rating of 0 to 10.

  5. Homeostasis in wellbeing • Homeostasis is: • “the property of a system that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition of properties like temperature or pH” (Wikipedia, 2012) • Wellbeing tends to stay around the 70 – 75 level (on a scale of 0 – 100) and exhibits a very narrow range (see Cummins, 2003, 2009) • The mean in all 9 waves of HILDA is 7.9, (compared to about 7.5 in (AQOL).

  6. Homeostasis in wellbeing

  7. Homeostasis in wellbeing

  8. Homeostatic Failure • When homeostasis fails to protect the wellbeing of the individual • Sudden drop in wellbeing • Occurs after challenges to subjective wellbeing become too much for the homeostatic system to deal with: may be due to some major life events or other factors.

  9. Homeostatic failure • Source: Cummins (2009), p. 5

  10. Observed homeostatic failure • Fall from above 7 to below 7 • Minimum of 2 point drop: fairly significant drop • HILDA Data - 240 out of 7,721 people (3.1%) experienced homeostatic failure from Wave 8 to Wave 9

  11. Homeostatic Failure • What can contribute to homeostatic failure? • Change in health • Change in status, eg, employment • Change in social capital – connectedness with community • Life events – death of a child, death of a partner, separation, divorce, etc • Income – protective? • Incremental – Burned dinner, Dog died, Lost job, House burned down, Partner left me

  12. Identifying what contributes to homeostatic failure • Data • HILDA – longitudinal survey • Able to see wellbeing from one year to the next for the same person • Need to be able to derive change in indicators from one year to the next • Presented some problems when considering social capital – what are the cutoffs? • Number of major life events • Major life events identified separately

  13. Identifying what contributes to homeostatic failure • Analysis • Logistic regression model • Modelling what affects the probability of homeostatic failure • Replicate weights to calculate standard errors

  14. Identifying what contributes to homeostatic failure • Results from Number of major life events

  15. Identifying what contributes to homeostatic failure • Results from all major life events

  16. Discussion • Only 2 significant life events affect homeostatic failure • Separation (higher probability) • Birth of a child (lower probability) • All other major life events (death of a child/relative, physical violence, fired from job) • Health of yourself and your family has significant impact on homeostatic failure • Consistent with other work on health and wellbeing

  17. Discussion • Amount of leisure time has a significant impact • Possibly through stress in job • Income is protective • Can use income to purchase goods and services to protect you from homeostatic failure

  18. NATSEM Working Paper-18 • This would be available as NATSEM Working Paper 18 and can be downloaded from http://www.natsem.canberra.edu.au/publications/search-by-type/?publication-type=working-papers • We are happy to take any comments on this.

  19. Questions and comments? Itismita.mohanty@natsem.canberra.edu.auwww.natsem.canberra.edu.au

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