Family-focused quality of life assessment and its implications for children’s social welfare: an ecological validity context
LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Ekologinis pagrįstumas; Ekologinė gerovė; Gyvenimo kokybė; Socialinės vertybės; Vaikas; Vaikų socialinė gerovė; Šeima; Child; Children social welfare; Ecological validity; Family; Quality of life; Social values; Welfare.
ENQuality of life in the present era has become a trend in society and a goal that all economic, political, social and educational systems seek to achieve for the new social life (Khalifa, 2019). The relationship between the quality of life and social welfare is of shared taxonomy, therefore it is difficult to define unambiguously. It is hard to imagine social welfare without quality of life, but in order to implement quality of life, there is a need for the context of social welfare, which could be described with social and personal well-being indicators, such as a subjective perception of socioeconomic status, social optimism, social ties and level of active involvement (Telešienė, 2015; Krinitcyna, Mikhailova, & German, 2016;). In the opinion of Krutulienė (2012), the problem lies in that the terms “quality of life”, “welfare” and “well-being” are usually used as synonyms. In this article we follow Noll’s (2000) view which indicates that quality of life is a component of the welfare concept (cited in Krutulienė, 2012). Postmodern family pays increasingly more attention to the quality of life, constantly questioning interpersonal relationships among spouses, parents, and children and the way they create well-being. That is why familial well-being is becoming more and more important in the perspective of welfare (Kaufmann et al., 2002). However, we lack instruments to evaluate children’s quality of life with familyfocused approach. For that purpose, we introduce KIDSCREEN52 survey with 1763 children (aged 8-18 years old) and 1564 parents.Moreover, we raise the question of ecological validity, firstly, because there is a need to develop measurements that are closer to real life situations, in order to productively contribute to the ensuring of children’s social welfare. Secondly, even though such terms as quality of life and welfare are tightly and synonymously intertwined in their usage, the instruments that measure them are very different, which limits opportunities to transfer data among various fields. We claim that ecological validity could help better understand the relationships between different measurement indicators. KIDSCREEN52 survey covers the widest range of already recognized dimensions of quality of life, accounting for rich content of everyday and real life in each dimension. The results of statistical analysis reveal that differences in parents’ and children’s assessments of quality of life are related to gender, age (of children) and marital status, income and education (of parents). Moreover, ecological validity approach enables to note a pattern of shared taxonomy that implies that the child’s quality of life in the family is not a sum of individual family members’ assessments or causal looping dependency of the individual’s behavior. We do believe that the quality of life approach allows the development of new generation welfare models that are oriented to selfregulated and indeterministic individual behavior enabling for universal abilities that can help people create satisfying lives and that is increasingly in demand in all environments. [From the publication]
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