The psychology of pandemic policy support: unraveling the complex interplay of personal values and value congruence across 20 European countries.

OBJECTIVES: We explored the roles of personal values and value congruence-the alignment between individual and national values-in predicting public support for pandemic restrictions across 20 European countries. STUDY DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. METHODS: We analyzed multinational European survey data (N = 34,356) using Schwartz's values theory and person-environment fit theory. Multilevel polynomial regression was employed to assess the linear and curvilinear effects of personal values on policy support. Multilevel Euclidean similarity analysis and response surface analysis were conducted to evaluate the impact of value congruence and delineate nuanced congruence patterns. RESULTS: Findings revealed that extreme levels of security, conformity, stimulation, hedonism, and achievement values were associated with decreased policy support. Value congruence with security, conformity, and benevolence increased support, while congruence with stimulation, hedonism, and achievement reduced it. High congruence between personal and national social focus values significantly boosted policy support. Extreme mismatches in self-direction values amplified support. Societal power exceeding personal power also increased support. Matched levels of hedonism motivated greater support, while stimulation and achievement value (in)congruence showed little impact. CONCLUSIONS: We highlight the differential effects of personal values and value congruence on public attitudes toward pandemic restrictions. The findings underscore the importance of considering the interplay between individual and societal values when designing and implementing effective pandemic response strategies.

Homopositivity Across Europe: Predictors, Pathways, and Moderators.

Although homopositivity, the attitudinal acceptance of homosexuality, has generally increased across Western societies, there remains considerable homonegativity across certain regions of the world as well as certain demographic and socioeconomic groups. Although previous cross-national research has successfully identified the key factors affecting homopositive attitudes, the literature neglects both potentially key mediation pathways and moderating interactions between those factors that may unlock more nuanced understanding of these variations in homopositive attitudes across individuals and places. In response, the present study innovatively applied a multivariate structural equation modelling approach to the latest Wave 9 (2018 data) of the large-scale cross-national European Social Survey data in order to shed new light on these currently neglected predictors, pathways, and moderating influences on homopositive attitudes. It used a three-item latent variable to measure the homopositive attitudes outcomes construct. Its explanatory variables were focused across three key sets of factors identified in theoretical and empirical literature (socioeconomics, religiosity, and values) alongside various wider controls. Our analyses made several innovative methodological and empirical contributions to existing debate. Key innovative findings include the original identification of important indirect effects of religious beliefs on homopositive attitudes via religious practices, important indirect effects of education on homopositive attitudes via household income, and the role of national welfare regimes to homopositive attitudes (and with its effects interestingly not moderated by household income).

Scar effects of unemployment on generalised social trust: The joint impact of individual and contextual unemployment across Europe.

How does unemployment affect generalised social trust? A growing body of work has analysed the scar effects of unemployment on trust. However, this literature has not yet addressed the moderating role of contextual unemployment. In this article, we extend a theoretical framework positing that individual and contextual unemployment depress generalised social trust and formulate competing hypotheses on their interaction. We test these hypotheses relying on Rounds 4-9 (2008-2018) of the European Social Survey, for up to 29 countries and 227 regions. Results from three-level multilevel models indicate that individual and contextual unemployment are associated with lower trust, although at the macro-level this holds only for cross-sectional unemployment. At the macro-micro level, we find that lower cross-sectional unemployment rates powerfully exacerbate the individual association, while the latter becomes not significant at higher cross-sectional rates. These findings highlight that individual and contextual unemployment are central to illuminate social trust patterns.

Testing the parasite-stress theory of sociality based on the circular model of human values: A multilevel analysis approach.

Little research has tested the parasite-stress theory of sociality based on a well-framed model of personal values using a multilevel analysis conducted on multinational samples. To robustly examined the validity of this novel theory of cultural evolution, this study used multilevel data of European Social Survey (from 2002 to 2016, 32 countries, N = 374,730) and World Values Survey (from 2005 to 2014, 80 countries, N = 173,540) to investigate the relationships between pathogen prevalence and the conflicting values dimensions (Conservation versus Openness to change; Self-enhancement versus Self-transcendence) of the circular model of human values, accounting for the micro- (age, sex, religious belief, education, and income) and macro-level predictors (modernization and cultural similarity). Results did not support the parasite-stress theory at both the country and individual levels when controlling for a composite index of modernization. Across all analyses, modernization remained a significant predictor of values even when controlling for cultural similarity. No conclusions changed when using an alternative parasite stress estimate. These findings support the modernization theory of value-change but challenge the roles of infectious diseases in cultural evolution.

Risky health behaviours and socioeconomic inequalities in European countries: new insights from European Social Survey.

OBJECTIVES: This paper explores education-, income- and occupational class-related inequalities in risky health behaviours including into models all three factors together as well as their interactions, which has not been undertaken by previous studies analysing socioeconomic status (SES) related differences in risky health behaviours. METHODS: Our data source is the special module "Social Inequalities in Health" included into the European Social Survey Round 7 (ESS R7) and conducted in 20 European countries. We run nine separate multilevel binomial logistic regression analyses for all the risky health behaviours with all our independent and control variables including country as the second level random intercept. Into all the models we also included interaction terms to consider possible moderating effects of separate independent variables. RESULTS: Education and income emerged as factors most consistently related to risky health behaviours, but occupational class differences were also found to be significant: eating vegetables or salad less than once a day and being daily smoker is positively related to lower SES as measured by all three indicators; eating fruits less than once a day is related to lower income and occupational class, while drinking alcohol at least several times a week is positively related to higher education and higher income; being physically active for less than 3 days per week is positively related to lower education; patterns of heavy smoking and binge drinking are inconsistently related to SES variables. We also found considerable regional variation, especially in fruit and vegetable consumption, being physically active and alcohol consumption patterns. CONCLUSIONS: Without careful theoretical consideration linking SES and risky health behaviours, education, income and occupational class cannot substitute each other in the study of SES-related differences of health behaviours, as assumed in the larger part of research on the subject.

The cross-country and cross-time measurement invariance of positive and negative affect scales: Evidence from European Social Survey.

Survey-based measures of subjective well-being are increasingly often analyzed cross-culturally. However, international comparison of these measures requires measurement invariance. Therefore, the major goal of this study is to investigate the cross-country and cross-time comparability of the 4-item positive and 7-item negative affect scales used in European Social Survey Round 3 (2006) and Round 6 (2012). This study applies both the traditional exact and the more recent Bayesian approximate approach to assess whether the affect scales are measurement invariant. The approximate approach detected several non-invariant items that are problematic for cross-national comparison and should be dropped from the scales. Consequently, measurement invariance was established in all countries over the two rounds for the reduced scales, allowing researchers to meaningfully compare their latent mean scores and the relationships with other theoretical constructs of interest. Thus, the study highlights the advantages of using multiple indicators and the necessity of measurement invariance testing in subjective well-being research.

Use of complementary and alternative medicine in Europe: Health-related and sociodemographic determinants.

AIMS: The aim of this research was to study health-related and sociodemographic determinants of the use of different complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments in Europe and differences in CAM use in various European countries. METHODS: The study was based on a design-based logistic regression analysis of the European Social Survey (ESS), Round 7. We distinguished four CAM modalities: manual therapies, alternative medicinal systems, traditional Asian medical systems and mind-body therapies. RESULTS: In total, 25.9% of the general population had used CAM during the last 12 months. Typically, only one CAM treatment had been used, and it was used more often as complementary rather than alternative treatment. The use of CAM varied greatly by country, from 10% in Hungary to almost 40% in Germany. Compared to those in good health, the use of CAM was two to fourfold greater among those with health problems. The health profiles of users of different CAM modalities varied. For example, back or neck pain was associated with all types of CAM, whereas depression was associated only with the use of mind-body therapies. Individuals with difficult to diagnose health conditions were more inclined to utilize CAM, and CAM use was more common among women and those with a higher education. Lower income was associated with the use of mind-body therapies, whereas the other three CAM modalities were associated with higher income. CONCLUSIONS: Help-seeking differed according to the health problem, something that should be acknowledged by clinical professionals to ensure safe care. The findings also point towards possible socioeconomic inequalities in health service use.

How to understand informal caregiving patterns in Europe? The role of formal long-term care provisions and family care norms.

AIMS: Motivated by ageing populations, healthcare policies increasingly emphasize the role of informal care. This study examines how prevalence rates of informal caregivers and intensive caregivers (i.e. those who provide informal care for at least 11 hours a week) vary between European countries, and to what extent informal caregiving and intensive caregiving relate to countries' formal long-term care provisions and family care norms. METHODS: Multilevel logistic regression analyses on data from the European Social Survey Round 7 ( n = 32,894 respondents in n = 19 countries) were used to test (a) contradicting hypotheses regarding the role of formal long-term care provisions based on crowding-out, crowding-in and specialization arguments and (b) the hypothesis that strong family care norms are positively related to (intensive) informal caregiving. RESULTS: Prevalence rates of informal caregiving varied between European countries, from 20% to 44%. Intensive caregiving ranged from 4% to 11%. Opposite patterns regarding the role of formal long-term care provisions were revealed: generous long-term care provisions in a country were related to a higher likelihood of providing informal care, but a lower likelihood of providing intensive care. Moreover, intensive caregiving was more likely when family care norms in a country were strong. CONCLUSIONS: This study provided support for the specialization argument by showing that generous formal long-term care provisions crowded-out intensive caregiving, but also encouraged more people to provide (some) informal care. Because especially intensive caregiving is burdensome, low levels of formal long-term care provisions might bring risks to caregivers' well-being and healthcare systems' sustainability.

Examining macroeconomic determinants of trust in parliament: A dynamic multilevel framework.

The extensive literature on political trust has long suggested a link between macroeconomic conditions and public trust in political institutions. However, empirical evidence regarding this relationship remains ambiguous. Conflicting results appear to be related to differences in research design: while cross-sectional studies tend not to find evidence of a link between macroeconomic variables and trust in political institutions, most longitudinal studies do. In this paper, using recent advances in multilevel methodology, we examine both cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of macroeconomic variables on trust in national parliament within a single dynamic multilevel framework. By analyzing all seven waves of the European Social Survey (2002-2014), we demonstrate that declining macroeconomic performance has a negative within-country effect on trust in national parliament. At the same time, we find limited evidence in support of this association at the between-country level. This discrepancy suggests the presence of confounding factors that are unaccounted for in cross-sectional designs. We therefore argue for the importance of examining within-country effects as they provide a more stringent test of causality.

Navigating between two cultures: Immigrants' gender attitudes toward working women.

BACKGROUND: Gender attitudes toward women's employment are of particular importance because they positively influence gender-equal outcomes in the labor market. Our understanding of the mechanisms that promote egalitarian gender attitudes among immigrants, however, remains limited. OBJECTIVE: By studying first- and second-generation immigrants from multiple origins and living in different countries, this article seeks to explain under what conditions the prevalent cultural attitudes toward gender roles at the origin and destination influence immigrants' gender attitudes. We address three main research questions. First, does the country-of-origin gender ideology influence immigrants' views toward working women? Second, does the country-of-destination gender ideology influence immigrants' view toward working women? Are these relationships moderated by (1) the immigrant generation; (2) the age at arrival in the country of destination; (3) the length of residence at destination? METHODS: Using data from the European Social Survey, we model immigrants' gender attitudes toward working women using linear cross-classified models to account for clustering into the country of origin and destination. RESULTS: The results highlight the importance of the context of early socialization in shaping immigrants' gender attitudes. First-generation immigrants, and more specifically, adult migrants hold gender attitudes that reflect more strongly the country of origin's gender culture. In contrast, the positive association between gender ideology at destination and immigrants' gender attitudes is stronger among second-generation immigrants and child migrants. CONTRIBUTION: We add to the literature on gender ideology formation by analyzing the influence of gender ideology at the origin- and destination-levels on the gender attitudes of immigrants from 96 countries of origin and residing across 32 countries of destination.

Institutional change and parental compensation in intergenerational attainment.

Previous research has shown how institutional changes, such as educational expansion, have weakened parental influence on educational attainment. We extend this analysis to occupational attainment and put forth a parental compensation hypothesis: as the origin-education (OE) association weakens, parents act to compensate for this in order to maintain their influence on the child's occupational attainment. We should see this as a strengthened origin-destination association net of education (net OD). Further, we study whether these compensatory actions are triggered by changes in educational institutions and whether the institutional changes that reduce educational inequality are the same ones that prompt parental compensation. We have linked data from five waves of the European Social Survey (2002-10) with data on educational institutions matched to birth cohorts born 1941-80 in 25 countries. We find weakened OE and strengthened net OD associations, supporting our parental compensation hypothesis. Multilevel mixed effects regression analyses reveal that reforms lengthening compulsory education, and the increased access to and the attainment of higher education have had a positive influence on parental compensation. As a conclusion, a later school leaving age seems to secure increased parental influence on children's occupational attainment, while parents seem to have reacted to a lesser extent on the changes in higher education.

Public evaluation of health services across 21 European countries: The role of culture.

AIMS: This work examined the role of cultural values in understanding people's satisfaction with health services across Europe. METHODS: We used multilevel linear regression analysis on the seventh round of the European Social Survey from 2014, including c. 40,000 respondents from 21 countries. Preliminary intraclass correlation analyses led us to believe that some explanations of variance in the dependent variable were to be found at the country level. In search of country level explanations, we attempted to account for the role of national culture in influencing citizens' attitudes towards health systems. This was done by using Hofstede's dimensions of power distance, individualism, masculinity and uncertainty avoidance, giving each country in the survey a mean aggregated score. RESULTS: In our first model with individual level variables, being female, having low or medium education, experiencing financial strain, and reporting poor health and unmet medical needs were negatively associated with individual satisfaction with national healthcare systems, with the latter variable showing the strongest effect. After including Hofstede's cultural dimensions in our multilevel model, we found that the power distance index variable had a negative effect on the dependent variable, significant at the 0.1 level. CONCLUSIONS: Citizens are likely to evaluate their national health system more negatively in national cultures associated with autocracy and hierarchy.

Rising Preferred Retirement Age in Europe: Are Europe's Future Pensioners Adapting to Pension System Reforms?

This study investigates whether older workers have adapted their preferred retirement age to the pension reforms aimed at extending working life. Based on data from Eurobarometer and the European Social Survey in 12 European countries, the analysis shows that future pensioners have indeed increased their preferred retirement age and adjusted to the new credo of late retirement. However, the strength of the increase was found to vary between different groups of older workers: It is much stronger for the higher-educated than for the lower-educated. This finding supports recent concerns regarding the reemergence of social inequality in the retirement process.

The gap between births intended and births achieved in 22 European countries, 2004-07.

Using data from the 2004 and 2007 waves of the European Social Survey (ESS), we find that for every 100 births intended, about 60 births occur, on average, across 22 countries. This shortfall in fertility masks substantial heterogeneity between subgroups within the populations surveyed. Motherhood status, age, partnership status, and the strength of fertility intentions moderate the relationship between women's childbearing plans and births measured at the country level. Individual-level analyses using data from three countries included in the 2005 and 2008 waves of the Generations and Gender Survey are consistent with our country-level analyses. We demonstrate that repeat cross-sectional data can be used to analyse the correspondence between childbearing plans and births when longitudinal data are lacking.

The preferred role and perceived performance of the welfare state: European welfare attitudes from a multidimensional perspective.

Welfare state support has two core dimensions: attitudes about what the welfare state should do and beliefs about its actual performance. People can combine any position on one dimension with any position on the other, yielding four opinion clusters: people can combine preferences for a relatively strong role of the welfare state with a perception of a relatively low or high welfare state performance; likewise, people preferring a small role of the welfare state can perceive a high or low performing welfare state. We apply Latent Class Factor Analysis to data of 22 European countries from the 2008/9 European Social Survey. We find that each of the four clusters contains a substantial proportion of respondents that differs between welfare regimes. In addition, cluster membership is also related to covariates that measure people's structural positions and ideological preferences.

A problem of gendered injustice? Objective and subjective poverty among older women and men across European welfare regimes.

Using European Social Survey data, this article studies the prevalence of objective and subjective poverty among older women and men (60+ years) in 21 European countries. Objective poverty refers to whether one's disposable income falls below the poverty line, whereas subjective poverty relates to the capacity to make ends meet. It analyzes gender differences in these two dimensions of poverty and the role of gender as an explanation to these phenomena while controlling for other individual-level variables as well as the role of welfare state regimes. The results show that older women are more exposed to objective poverty than men, and that female gender remains strongly and positively correlated with this kind of poverty even when controlling for other variables. They also show that other individual-level variables, such as partnership, paid work and education curbs objective poverty, while the type of welfare regime does not matter. As to subjective poverty, on the other hand, there is no significant association with female gender, nor with the type of welfare regime, while individual-level variables such as subjective health, partnership and paid work are negatively correlated with this dimension of poverty. Subjective poverty is somewhat more influenced by contextual factors than objective poverty although the type of welfare state regime is not significantly associated with subjective or objective poverty.

No evidence that social-democratic welfare states equalize valued outcomes for individuals with disabilities.

It is acknowledged that generous welfare states can provide better outcomes to their populations in terms of objective and subjective indicators of well-being, yet there is little comparative evidence of the role that the welfare state regime plays in lessening disability-based inequalities. Using a large comparative data set of most European societies, Tukey's honestly significant difference and generalized Hausman tests for six welfare state regimes, we examine the assumption that social-democratic countries perform better in mitigating disability-based inequalities than conservative, liberal, Southern, Eastern European, and the former Soviet Union welfare state regimes. We compare the valued outcomes for individuals with and without disabilities regarding their education, labour market participation, material well-being, and life satisfaction. The main finding of this study is that the most generous welfare states in Europe do not perform better, and in some cases, perform worse, than other less comprehensive welfare state regimes in closing the gap in valued outcomes between individuals with disabilities and the rest of the population. We discuss potential explanations of these inequalities such as the nature of expectations and changing characteristics of welfare state regimes, and difficulties related to measuring disabilities across European societies.

The costs of ideological prosociality: Analyses of the European Social Survey from 2002 to 2018 find negative relationships between endorsing universalistic values and well-being and social capital.

Traditionally, prosociality has been conceptualized in terms of the interpersonal domain, for example, helping behavior. Nevertheless, people can be prosocial in terms of ideological domains, for example, social policies they support. The present study examined the utility of distinguishing interpersonal and ideological prosocial values as predictors of well-being and social capital. Data from nine European Social Surveys were combined. The Universalism and Benevolence values of Schwartz's basic human values were treated as measures of ideological and interpersonal prosocial values. Relationships between Universalism and Benevolence and well-being and social capital were examined with multilevel models, persons nested with rounds, rounds nested within countries. Respondent sex, age, and education were included as covariates. These analyses found that Benevolence was positively related to satisfaction with life and happiness, whereas Universalism was negatively related to satisfaction with life and happiness. Although endorsing both values was positively related to attitudinal measures of social capital (e.g., people can be trusted), Universalism was negatively related to self-reports of social activity, whereas Benevolence was either positively related or unrelated to self-reports of social activity. Being ideologically prosocial appears to be associated with reduced well-being. Future research is needed to explain the mechanisms responsible for this relationship.

Disentangling the complexities of modelling when high social capital contributes to indicating good health.

The association between social capital and health is under continuous research. Based both on theoretical frameworks and previous empirical studies, the magnitude and sign of this association are ambiguous. Our main goal is to empirically investigate under which conditions is social capital relevant to obtain good or very good self-rated health, while acknowledging that different paths can lead to this outcome. The data used in this study come from the European Social Survey 2018 (47,423 observations for 29 European countries) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was adopted. Our results show that neither the presence of social capital (as measured in this study - 'Generalised trust' and/or 'Informal social connections'), nor its absence, is a necessary condition for good or very good self-rated health. While not being necessary, there are contexts where social capital is relevant for health and, whenever it is present, it positively contributes to good or very good self-rated health. However, our results further suggest that social capital alone is not sufficient to be healthy. The relevance of social capital is contingent on the presence, or absence, of other conditions. What works for some individuals does not work for others. And for any given individual, rarely there is only one way to be healthy. Additionally, our findings suggest that the impact of belonging to a minority ethnic group on health might be stronger than what has been hitherto recognised.

Does Misery Love Company? Multilevel Relationships between Perceived Age Discrimination and Happiness among Older Europeans.

The present study examines how contextual age discrimination moderates the individual-level association between perceived age discrimination and happiness among older Europeans. In this endeavor, we test two opposing views: 1) the "social norm" hypothesis that predicts the association between perceived age discrimination and happiness to become weaker in areas with a higher average level of age discrimination; and 2) conversely the "contagion effect" hypothesis that predicts the association to grow stronger in such areas. Using data from the European Social Survey (2008), we estimate two- and three-level mixed effects models to test these opposing hypotheses. Our findings from multilevel analysis lend support to the social norm hypothesis. Specifically, the negative link between perceived age discrimination and happiness is weaker in subnational regions where the proportion of victims of age discrimination is higher.