Ontological security, social connectedness and the well-being of Australia’s ageing baby boomers

Abstract

This study investigates the extent to which social connectedness may mediate the link between ontological security and subjectively measured well-being of Australia’s baby boomers. The results indicate that, on average, for Australia’s baby boomers, a relative lack of ontological security is associated with lower levels of well-being and social connectedness. Further, social connectedness is linked to higher levels of well-being. These findings hold, whether or not other things are held constant. In addition, there is some evidence to suggest that social connectedness partially mediates the link between ontological security and well-being. Further investigation reveals that the nature of the link between ontological security and well-being may depend on a resident’s age. Most strikingly, social connectedness is found to consistently attenuate and completely mediate this age-specific negative link between a relative absence of ontological security and well-being.

Keywords:

• Baby boomers
• Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey
• social connectedness
• well-being

Acknowledgements

This paper uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. The HILDA Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either DSS or the Melbourne Institute.

Notes

1. Baby boomers include those residents born between 1946 and 1965 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004) Baby boomers constitute a diverse cohort characterized by both similarities and contradictions. The term is used here as it relates to statistical data rather than to suggest a collapsing of difference and diversity of people in this cohort.

2. Also, quite closely related is the recent work of Bentley et al. (2016). The authors find renting to be associated with lower levels of mental health. Furthermore, they advocate fixed effects models to adjust for unobserved characteristics yet only parameterise age group (25–44 and 45–64 years), survey year, change of residence and equivalized household income in the model. Moreover, an often unrecognised drawback of fixed effects estimation stems from its inefficiency in estimating the effect of variables that have little within variance and the complete loss of information between individuals (>50% of the variation in this case) (T. Plümper & V. E. Troeger, 2007).

3. A random effects ordered probit model, which appreciates the ordinal nature of the responses to the question, ‘how often do you get together socially with friends or relatives not living with you?’ failed to yield a statistically significant coefficient estimate for the variable renter, without holding other things constant.

4. A random effects ordered probit model, which appreciates the ordinal nature of the responses to the question, ‘how often do you get together socially with friends or relatives not living with you?’ yielded a statistically significant coefficient estimate for the variable renter, holding other things constant.

5. Private and social renting can offer different levels of ontological security (Fitzpatrick & Pawson, 2014). Appendix 1 Table A1 presents results which distinguish between social and private renting. The results indicate that the magnitude of lower levels of well-being for the renting can be attributed largely to social renting which is more than three times the size of the private renting coefficient. Moreover, for both private and social renters social connectedness on the whole appears to perform a partially mediating role, statistically significant at the 5% level.

6. A random effects ordered probit model, which appreciates the ordinal nature of the responses to the question, ‘how often do you get together socially with friends or relatives not living with you?’ confirmed this statistically significant coefficient estimate, at the 5% level, for the interaction term Renter × Age > 60, holding other things constant.

7. The average mental health score (on a scale of 0–100) for a resident 60 years or over is approximately 50.

8. As pointed out by an anonymous referee, for younger people technology may have positive and negative implications for their well-being, which similarly may be mediated by social connectedness.

9. Parenthetically, it is worth noting that self-selection could be expected to bias downwards the coefficient estimates in this instance. This is because residents who have a stronger preference for renting may choose to rent whereas those who dislike renting the most would opt not to rent.