Astrid Kemperman (p), Pauline Van den Berg, Minou Weijs-Perrée, Kevin Uytdewilligen

Social participation and integration of older adults are important aspects of healthy aging, as they are positively associated with better health, well-being and quality of life. However, in general, older adults have smaller social networks due to changes in their life cycle stage such as retirement, or age-related losses such as death of a partner or friends, along with a declining health and increasing mobility limitations. As a consequence, there is an increasing percentage of seniors that experience feelings of loneliness and social isolation.
Previous studies observed factors that explain differences in social participation and loneliness, such as personal characteristics and the social and physical living environment. However, existing knowledge is often based on bivariate relationships between these factors or studies only including a limited number of variables. Therefore, the aim of this study is to bring all these factors together into a more comprehensive framework to explain the (direct and indirect) relationships between socio-demographics, living environmental characteristics, social participation and loneliness.
Data was collected by a survey among 182 adults aged 65 years and over living in the West Brabant region in the Netherlands. Questions were asked about personal- and household characteristics, health status and the respondent’s Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and mobility. Social environmental characteristics were asked with questions about the feeling of safety in the neighborhood, neighborhood attachment, and satisfaction with facilities. Also information about social network size, satisfaction with the network, and feelings of loneliness was collected. Furthermore, the respondents were asked about their social activities. Based on the postal code of the residence the urban density level and distance to facilities were defined.
For the analysis, a Bayesian belief network (BBN) modeling approach was used that derives and represents all direct and indirect relations between the variables. The BBN is estimated from the database by using a network learning algorithm. A major advantage of a BBN is that the network structure takes direct and indirect relationships between the variables into account.
The resulting BBN shows that feelings of loneliness are directly related to satisfaction with one’s social network and neighborhood attachment, and that they are indirectly related to perceived safety of the living environment and satisfaction with local facilities and services. Furthermore, a number of other interesting relationships were found. This knowledge is relevant to urban planners and policy makers who focus on creating livable and healthy social neighborhoods for the aging population.

Ryuta Mori (p), Kazunori Nakajima, Naoki Sakamoto, Eiji Ohno, Masafumi Morisugi

In recent years, based on the data of the happiness survey aimed at clarifying determinants of subjective happiness, economic evaluation of various mortality risks can be implemented.
In this survey, we prepare the degree of subjective happiness and some individual attribute questions. The degree of individual happiness that can be estimated from this survey data is not constant. Therefore, it is conceivable that the value of a statistical life (VSL) utilizing this will have a difference for each individual attribute. Therefore, we thought that it is necessary to clarify how much difference the VSL generates due to the difference in attributes.
In this study, first, we conducted a happiness survey in the Web format in Japan in 2017. The question of this survey was set many items which may have an influence on individual happiness. Second, we estimated parameters by applying an ordered response model to the data obtained from this survey. Finally, we tried to measure the VSL by multi-attribute based on the estimation result of these parameter.
The findings in this study are as follows; although the evaluation of the VSL was different due to the difference of individual attributes, it was suggested that the high and low of the VSL varied.

Umbu Reku Raya , Budy Resosudarmo (p)

It has been widely known that most societies in the world consist of various socio-economy groups—characterized by, among others, their ethnicity, religion or wealth--competing one and another over the available surrounding resources, that many times are limited. This competition in many cases has resulted in inter-group inequalities in wealth, education, power, and in creating the risk of civil conflict. In the last four decades, some intra and inter-religion competitions have turned into violent conflicts or wars globally. However, despite its importance in preventing escalating conflict, not many studies devoted to the understanding of the inter-religion gap in development outcomes in conflict prone regions. This paper aims to contribute to this literature by unearthing the Muslim-Christian majority-minority gap in human capital in conflict prone zones in Eastern Indonesia.

In this paper, we assume that both the Muslim and the Christian groups pursue their education beyond their hedonic personal interest i.e. as a group of people, both groups want to outperform one another in human capital accumulation so that they can maintain superiority in the labor market and political arena. Our framework of analysis puts the Muslim majority in competition with their Christian minority counterpart and the Muslim minority competes with their Christian majority counterpart. Our outcome variables of interest are years of schooling and wages. We jointly test whether the Muslim disadvantage occurs when Muslim are the majority or minority.

Operationally, we define an individual as a member of religious majority group if he or she was born in the district where his or her religion is the majority; otherwise he or she falls under the religious minority category. The data on years of schooling and religious affiliation are from the 2012 Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) East. Using OLS with ethnic and province fixed effect estimation, we find that for both Muslims and Christians, being religious majority is associated with higher years of schooling but not necessarily higher wages.

Our tentative results show that being Muslim majority correlates with 17.6% higher years of schooling, 1.5% higher body height and 33.4% higher yearly wages than Christian minority. Meanwhile, being Christian majority correlates with 6.8% higher years of schooling, 0.4% higher body height but 38.9% lower yearly wages than Muslim minority. Overall, being religious majority is associated with higher years of schooling and higher body height but not necessarily associated with higher wages.