Gerovės ir prokreacinės elgsenos vertinimas

LTRemiantis Kartų ir lyčių tyrimo antrosios bangos duomenų struktūra sukurtas GPE indeksas, kurio kontekste į individo gerovę žvelgiama kaip į kompleksinį reiškinį, apimantį tiek subjektyvųjį, tiek ir objektyvųjį aspektus, ir laikomasi požiūrio, kad individų gerovę galima išreikšti įvairiomis jų gyvenimo sritimis. Šiuo indeksu siekiama individų gerovę apibūdinti daugiausia per prokreacinės elgsenos ir jai artimų demografinių bei socialinių ekonominių procesų prizmę.

ENStarting with the philosophical reflections of philosophers of antiquity about quality of human life and what it means to live well, the phenomenon of human well-being has been an important sphere for human thought throughout history, even though it only became the object of the scientific investigation much later, when empirical data about well-being began to be used as the basis for conclusions about how well people live. Historically, the beginning of the scientific conception of well-being started in the seventeenth century and could be attributed to English economist W. Petty (1899), who estimated the average income of the English population. This income-based approach to well-being reached its apogee in the middle of the twentieth century when the first US national accounts were published. This income-based approach was later criticised for being too narrow, putting too much emphasis on the financial side of human life, and neglecting all the other various domains of human life. As a result of this, critique of the income-based approach as a measurement of wellbeing began to be seen in the 1970s, and the other aspects of human life started to be considered important domains for human well-being. Those domains are health, education, environment, culture, politics, etc. Indicators were developed to measure those domains, and complex indexes combining several domains of human life were created. The Human Development Index could be an example for that. Besides that, in the second half of the twentieth century the concept of so called subjective well-being or happiness emerged and has become a very popular object of research among social scientists. And later, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, complex indexes combining subjective and objective sides of well-being have emerged.Those indexes are Gross National Happiness, Your Better Life Index, Happy Planet Index, Legatum Prosperity Index, and National Accounts of Well-being. The main scientific problem of the construction of those indexes is how to combine various aspects of human life into one tool for measuring human well-being. Standardisation and transformation could be mentioned as the most favourable solution to this problem. It is quite likely that the existing methodologies for these indexes are only in their initial stages and could still develop in the future. The current study is divided into two parts. In the first part of this study, the Index of the Relationship Between Weil-Being and Procreation (IRWP) is presented and described. The index is based on the Generation and Gender Programme Survey and estimates wellbeing in six human domains: 1. Activity and education. 2. Income and wealth. 3. Relations and health. 4. Emotions. 5. Children. Most but not all of the domains mentioned have objective and subjective sides. Due to the limitations of the database, there is no subjective side for the domain of children. Due to its specifics, the domain of emotions has only a subjective side. In the second part of this study, the IRWP was used to analyse the relationship between well-being and the intention to have children in the next three years on the one hand and the impact of the number of children on parents' well-being on the other hand. The results show that there is relationship between well-being evaluated on a basis of the IRWP and intentions to have children in the next three years. Respondents who intend to have children in the next three years tend to have a higher score on the index than those who do not. The average score of the index is higher for those who intend to have children in the following domains of human life: activity and education, income and wealth, relations and health, and emotions.The tendency is opposite for the domain related to children. Those who intend to have children have lower well-being score than those who do not intend to have children in the next three years. Besides the impact of well-being on the intention to have children, the relationship between the number of children and parents well-being was also analysed. There are two opposite tendencies for the relationship between parents' well-being and number of children. For the age group of 20-50 years, more children mean less well-being for the parents. This is especially true for women because they are more occupied with taking care of their children than men what limits their career perspectives and influences their attitude about relationships and emotions. As a result ofthat, well-being in women's domains such as activity and education, income and wealth, relations and health, and emotions decreases with number of children. The only exception is objective well-being related to relations, because it is essential for the bigger number of children to have stable and supportive relations. The relationship between number of children and well-being is slightly different for men. This difference for men is based on patriarchal societal expectations concerning a man's role in a family. Men are expected to have financial security before children are planned. Men's objective well-being related to income and wealth even increases with the first children and then starts to decrease in the same pattern as in the case of women with the following children. In case of subjective well-being related to income and wealth, the same process starts after the second child. For men, well-being related to the other domains of life such as relations (both objective and subjective) and emotions increases with the number of children.