Reasons for Homeostatic Failure in Subjective Wellbeing Presentation to ACE12 A/Prof Robert Tanton, Dr. Itismita Mohanty, Dr. Anthony Hogan

2 Structure ●Wellbeing and Subjective Wellbeing ●Homeostasis in wellbeing ●A failure of homeostasis in wellbeing ●What affects homeostatic failure ●Future work

Wellbeing ●Wellbeing includes both objective conditions of life and subjective perceptions on life ●Individual level, this includes the physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual aspects of life. ●Broader level, this includes the social, material and natural environments surrounding each individual, and their interactions. 3

Understanding ‘Wellbeing’ ●An extension of psychological research on wellbeing and life satisfaction for individuals. ●Uses measures of subjective wellbeing: questions based on a psychological scale. ●The question asked in the HILDA is: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life?” with a rating of 0 to 10. 4

5 Homeostasis in wellbeing ●Homeostasis is: ● “the property of a system that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition of properties like temperature or pH” (Wikipedia, 2012) ●Wellbeing tends to stay around the 70 – 75 level (on a scale of 0 – 100) and exhibits a very narrow range (see Cummins, 2003, 2009) ●The mean in all 9 waves of HILDA is 7.9, (compared to about 7.5 in (AQOL).

6 Homeostasis in wellbeing

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8 Homeostatic Failure ●When homeostasis fails to protect the wellbeing of the individual ●Sudden drop in wellbeing ●Occurs after challenges to subjective wellbeing become too much for the homeostatic system to deal with: may be due to some major life events or other factors.

9 Homeostatic failure ●Source: Cummins (2009), p. 5

10 Observed homeostatic failure ●Fall from above 7 to below 7 ●Minimum of 2 point drop: fairly significant drop ●HILDA Data out of 7,721 people (3.1%) experienced homeostatic failure from Wave 8 to Wave 9

11 Homeostatic Failure ●What can contribute to homeostatic failure? ● Change in health ● Change in status, eg, employment ● Change in social capital – connectedness with community ● Life events – death of a child, death of a partner, separation, divorce, etc ● Income – protective? ●Incremental – Burned dinner, Dog died, Lost job, House burned down, Partner left me

12 Identifying what contributes to homeostatic failure ●Data ● HILDA – longitudinal survey –Able to see wellbeing from one year to the next for the same person ● Need to be able to derive change in indicators from one year to the next –Presented some problems when considering social capital – what are the cutoffs? ● Number of major life events ● Major life events identified separately

13 ●Analysis ● Logistic regression model –Modelling what affects the probability of homeostatic failure ● Replicate weights to calculate standard errors Identifying what contributes to homeostatic failure

14 ●Results from Number of major life events Identifying what contributes to homeostatic failure

15 ●Results from all major life events Identifying what contributes to homeostatic failure

16 Discussion ●Only 2 significant life events affect homeostatic failure ● Separation (higher probability) ● Birth of a child (lower probability) ●All other major life events (death of a child/relative, physical violence, fired from job) ●Health of yourself and your family has significant impact on homeostatic failure ● Consistent with other work on health and wellbeing

17 Discussion ●Amount of leisure time has a significant impact ● Possibly through stress in job ●Income is protective ● Can use income to purchase goods and services to protect you from homeostatic failure

NATSEM Working Paper-18 ●This would be available as NATSEM Working Paper 18 and can be downloaded from by-type/?publication-type=working-papers ●We are happy to take any comments on this. 18

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