European Youth During the Great Recession
A new co-authored publication with Leen Vandecasteele (University of Tüebingen) has recently been published in the International Journal of Psychology. In this manuscript, Leen and I study the extent to which young people are affected by the Great Recession. We study how the individual experience of economic hardship, or living in a context of economic downturn, has had an influence on subjective well-being, social and political attitudes, and human values. In our study, we combine several techniques (multilevel analysis on cross-sectional data, as well as fixed-effects regression on a pseudo-panel based) to respond to our research question. In line with existing studies, we show that human values are unaffected by economic hardship; subjective well-being is lower among those experiencing economic strain. Social attitudes are inconsistently affected by hardship: particularly those directed at society (e.g. political trust and satisfaction with the economy) are depressed by economic downturns.