Christchurch was a success! Here is my presentation word for word. This is the core of my research, if you read this you are up to date on my findings and efforts as an intellectual:
e-mail me for the PowerPoint: anne.marie.snider@gmail.com
SLIDE 1: It may be insufficient to confine the interpretation of SWB to the attributes of young people, whom most adults would agree, can often be moody and unpredictable. In the social and physical context from the neighborhood through to the city itself- may have measurable influences on youth life satisfaction.
At the beginning of my research I asked: are their environmental correlates of youth happiness? But as I started to explore my data set I became increasingly interested in what is making youth so unhappy and dissatisfied with life in general.
Perhaps for the sake of an argument, the antithesis of happiness or life satisfaction is depression- a sadness that is difficult to control. Keeping in mind that sadness can be out of our control, and sometimes take over our lives, one could then claim that chronic, manic sadness can be fatal in form of self-murder.
I argue that the act of suicide can be thought of as the endpoint of our subjective well-being (SWB).
So why focus on Youth Life Satisfaction in New Zealand? New Zealand used to have one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world, second only to Finland for males 15-24 and Japan for females 15-24. Things are getting better, New Zealand no longer holds a position in the top 3 highest youth suicide rates (within the latest OECD report), but the numbers are still usually high for an OECD country.
The story of suicide might be intimately linked with SWB measurements:
We don’t know the exact source of depression, but we do know that happiness has something to do with our environment, and who we are surround by. The story of happiness is the lack of negative effect and attunement with others.
The story of depression has yet to be written in New Zealand.
SLIDE 2: According to this graph done through studies by the University of Otago from 1988-1999 the West Coast suffered some of the highest suicide rates in the history of New Zealand. Surely New Zealanders are upset, but not terribly surprised by these numbers. That might be because you know the terrain, and you know the people.
With this graph in mind- Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson recently stated in an interview on Radio NZ that suicide is one of the contributing factors to social breakdown. The American Association of Suicidology estimated that for each of the 32,000 Americans who kill themselves annually there are six survivors. By a suicide survivor I mean the remaining family members and loved ones. Suicide is deadly to communities- it devastates surviving loved ones unlike other fatalities, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders rank surviving suicide as catastrophic- equivalent to that of a concentration camp experience.
SLIDE 3: Suicide has long been a health problem in New Zealand. From 2001-2006 307 people died by assault, “assault mortality” or murder. In 2006 alone 524 people in New Zealand took their own lives, multiply that by 6 and that is 3,000 plus people who are suffering from a traumatic stressful experience- JUST IN 2006.
Now I know that the stats are very upsetting, BUT they did happen, and regardless of their statistical differences- they are important marker for the progress of society.
SLIDE 4: Typically our lowest point of life happiness occurs around mid-age, when there are teenagers in the house…
This is a graph of the “U-shaped life cycle of Happiness” from studies done (by Blanchflower & Oslwald) on a UK labour force. The peak of the unhappiness can be seen around 44, where the probability of being depressed is the greatest. There are many international studies on life satisfaction and age that report similar findings such as these,
SLIDE 5: This is a graph of life satisfaction in New Zealand. Now I know it’s not terribly obvious but from this graph we can conclude that Youth are more likely to report low life satisfaction than the Mid Aged and Older cohorts.
SLIDE 6: We can see this more clearly in the table- YOUTH APPEAR TO BE LESS HAPPIER RELATIVE TO MIDDLE AGE THAN THE INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE SUGGESTS. THE GAP BETWEEN YOUTH AND MIDDLE AGE WE SUSPECT IS NARROWER IN NZ
SLIDE 7: So what do we know about the causes of suicide?
1. It is not a personal failure
2. Depression and Suicide are highly correlated
4. Suicidal thoughts are induced somewhat by chemical imbalances of serotonin in the synaptic gap
3. And From Durkheim’s famous sociological studies we know that suicide has something to do with the community/society, BUT the exact source of what causes BEING suicidal is unknown (Human volition quote & Durkheim image)
To test if suicide has anything to do with the community, we can use geography to detect a fundamental shift in the breaking of social bonds.
SLIDE 8: Editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies, Ruut Veenhoven has tabulated that average happiness peaks in Iceland and drops in India, lending to the idea that happiness differs from place to place. Within New Zealand SWB also varies we can test this using New Zealand’s Quality of life Survey. These are the 12 cities we use, These are my age groups.
By using the quality of life survey we can look at places with low self-reported SWB and test possible reasons for low life satisfaction in Youth.
SLIDE 9: One possible reason could be social capital- how connected we are to the communities we live in.
We know that Porirua and Outside the 12 Cities report low SWB.
When asked, “do you feel a sense of community your neighborhood” Youth in Porirua are much less likely to reply that they agree to feeling a sense of community at a significant level. They also are more likely to feel neutral about the issue of community. Porirua is known for it’s international community and high levels of deprivations. There are significantly large gaps of wealth in Porirua, this is well documented in 2001 Maps of Deprivation, this might have something to do with lower levels of social capital.
In 2006 New Zealand extended their collection of surveys to include 1,400 surveys Outside of the 12 Cities. When youth were asked outside the 12 cities if they feel a sense of community they overwhelmingly disagreed, we can see this by comparing the total population of people who disagreed (9.73%), with the Younger percentage of people who disagreed (16.32%). Youth are also less likely to agree that they feel a sense of community Outside the 12 Cities.
Our community involvement might be the key to understanding what causes low SWB in certain places, and possibly why suicide might occur more in certain areas over others.
SLIDE 10: But the breaking of bonds in society might best be determined by trust levels.
Research around the importance of trust is extensive, Johns Hopkins University Professor Fukuyama, Sanford Political Scientist Robert Putnum and Social Capital theorist David Halpern, have all found trust to be highly correlated with SWB,
Looking at these percentages it is apparent that youth in NZ are less likely say others can be trusted.
If trust is a key component of keeping relationships together, this should also be true for societies. Without trust it is hard progress. Why are youth less trusting than other age groups in New Zealand, and specifically in certain parts of the country? What life experiences have taught them, and lead them to believe that people usually cannot be trusted? And why do trust levels differ from place to place? This is where my research is heading.
SLIDE 11: In conclusion we know youth are an slightly more unhappier bunch, not just because of their teenage angst. We can see that there might be environmental place and social factors involved.
There is a Spatial Difference in Youth SWB
Therefore we can safely suspect that trust and social capital are somewhat determine by
GEOGRAPHY where you live and who you live by
We can use differences between places to understand what falls apart in society by measuring
•Social Capital- community connection, social isolation
•Trust-extent to which people believe others can usually be trusted
There seems to be a two-way relationship between the community involvement and suicide levels
Looking further into the measurements of social capital and trust might give us some clues onto how to predict and prevent suicide in New Zealand.
Thank you.
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