The European Sociological Review just published my review of Robert Putnam‘s Our Kids. The American Dream in Crisis. As the Dutch Universities seem to have put their license for Oxford University Press publications on hold because of Open Access perils, it’s even a challenge for me to read my own book review in print. Anyway, my latest version before it was sent to the book reviews editor can be retrieved by contacting me.
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.
