Money Matters: a Nuanced Approach to Understanding the Relationship between Household Income and Child Subjective Well-Being

Gill Main

doi:10.1007/s12187-018-9574-z

Abstract

This paper examines the links between household income and child subjective well-being. Previous studies produce contradictory findings: qualitative investigations indicate a strong relationship which is elusive in quantitative studies. I hypothesise that the reason for this discrepancy is that household-level measures of child poverty do not adequately capture children’s active roles in forming views on their material needs, assessing their comparative socio-economic status, and contributing to processes and outcomes of intra-household resource sharing. Thus a relationship between household income and subjective well-being is hypothesised to exist, but to be mediated by factors including (among others) material deprivation, perceptions of fairness in the processes and outcomes of intra-household allocation, and subjective material well-being. Drawing on survey data from a sample of 1010 parent-child (aged 10–16) pairs in England, structural equation modelling is used to examine these potential mediating effects. Findings indicate that income has a complex role to play in child subjective well-being, with significant direct and indirect associations. Income, deprivation, perceptions of the fairness of intra-household allocation processes and outcomes, and subjective material well-being are all significantly interrelated and are all predictors of subjective well-being. The complex nature of these relationships illustrates the multi-dimensional nature of child poverty and its impacts. Household income is an important factor; but alone it cannot capture children’s active roles in assessing their needs and material living conditions. This confirms the importance of considering children’s agency in understandings of child poverty and material well-being, and including their reports in studies of child poverty and intra-household allocation.

Highlights

The importance of household income as a predictor of negative outcomes for children and for the adults children become is well established
Building on Cummins’ (2000) hypothesis that the effects of income on subjective well-being are mediated by more concrete material and social factors, I examine whether a more nuanced approach to understanding the pathways via which household income is associated with individual subjective well-being can help in addressing this question
For the objective material well-being factor, household income and child deprivation were included as separate indicators rather than as co-predictors of a latent ‘objective material well-being’ variable, based on the findings reported above indicating that their effects on child subjective well-being have consistently been found to be substantially different

Summary

Introduction

The importance of household income as a predictor of negative outcomes for children and for the adults children become is well established (e.g. see Cooper and Stewart 2013). Building on Cummins’ (2000) hypothesis that the effects of income on subjective well-being are mediated by more concrete material and social factors, I examine whether a more nuanced approach to understanding the pathways via which household income is associated with individual subjective well-being can help in addressing this question Such an approach should incorporate children’s perspectives on their needs, their material living standards, and how resources are shared within their families. The growing consensus that poverty is a multidimensional concept has resulted in a proliferation of studies concerned with how best to reflect this in approaches to measurement, and an acknowledgement that low household income alone cannot provide a full picture. Relative deprivation approaches draw on Townsend’s (1979)

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Conclusion