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164 Volume LXIII nn. 3-4 – Luglio-Dicembre 2009 providing not only emotional support but also material assistance when economic difficulties or transitional troubles arise (Böhnke 2008). Finally, the institutional dimension concerns relationships between people and the State: while social dimension accounts for the private sphere of people, the institutional one focuses on individuals as citizens. These relations may be measured in term of offer and enjoyment of civil, political and socio-economic rights, and they include the socalled active citizenship rights. Finally, we consider social exclusion as a relative concept. Relativity means that an individual is socially excluded only with respect to other members of his society, and it does not exist an “absolute” social exclusion condition. In this sense, we deem crucial to introduce in the analysis also subjective elements. The qualitative aspects are as important as the quantitative ones to explain social exclusion situations, in all the considered dimensions (Pirani and Schifini 2008). 2. Data, indicators and covariates The analysis is carried out using the 56.1-2001 round of Eurobarometer (EB) Survey 1 , which collected data that are representative for the NUTS regions defined by Eurostat for all EU-15 countries. The hierarchical structure of the data consists of 15,927 individuals nested in 77 regions belonging to 15 countries, with minimum and maximum group sizes equal to 7 and 1,001 respondents, respectively. Reckoning with limited data availability, we selected some indicators from the EB 56.1 for each identified domain of exclusion. First, the objective measure of the economic and financial situation is obtained considering the income quartile of individuals, together with a composite indicator of the economic difficulties that people coped with in last twelve months. The self-rated measure of income is considered for comparative purposes, and in order to better characterize the economic dimension from a subjective perspective, we used also the indicator coming from the question: “Some people look down on me because of my income or job situation”. Referring to the social dimension, the 56.1 Eurobarometer dataset provides information about the frequency of the relationships with the “immediate” sphere of individuals: friends, relatives and neighbours. Moreover, we built an indicator capturing how much practical and emotional support people would expect to get from members outside their household in situations of need. Finally, another indicator offers the possibility to investigate the participation in social activities 1 Data, questionnaire and other information can be found on the web sites http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/index_en.htm and http://www.gesis.org/en/
Rivista Italiana di Economia Demografia e Statistica 165 like leisure or sport clubs. The subjective perceptions of social exclusion and of social usefulness are captured by the EB questions: “Do you feel left out of society?” and “Do you feel to have the chance to play a useful part in society?”. Finally, for the institutional dimension, the EB survey provides data about the subjective evaluation and satisfaction of the respondents about the medical services, their social entitlements in case of sickness, invalidity and unemployment, and the presence of vandalism and theft in the place where they live. In Latent Class models, covariates are used to predict the membership to latent classes, thus improving their description. The individual level covariates we used are the age and the occupational status of the respondents. Referring to the regional level covariates, we considered the gross domestic product (GDP), and we defined an indicator given by the ratio between the amount of taxes, social contribution and transfers paid, and the primary income, representing a proxy of the social protection expenditure of the region. Finally, using an individual response of Eurobarometer, we computed an indicator that quantifies, for each European region, the percentage of people attributing the responsibility of poverty and social exclusion either to individual or to societal failure. 3. A multilevel latent class model to study social exclusion We analyse the condition of social exclusion for the individuals. However, sharing the same environmental conditions, individuals within a region tend to be more alike than individuals coming from different regions. The approach followed to deal with the intra-region correlation is the so-called multilevel approach (Skrondal and Rabe-Hesketh 2004). First level units are individuals, and the first level model corresponds to a standard LC analysis (Hagenaars and McCutcheon 2002). Based on the observed indicators, individuals are classified in latent classes, representing the levels of exclusion. The regions where individuals live represent the second level units: the regional differences in the distribution of the latent variable are modelled allowing some parameters to vary across regions. Consider individuals i= 1,..., nj originated from an international sample of 77 European regions, j = 1,...,77 . Y ijk represents the response to item k (with k = 1,...,12 ) of person i coming from region j , whereas Y ij is the full K × 1 n × K × vector Y is the full ( ) 1 vector of responses of the same individual i , and j j of responses of all individuals in region j . All the K = 12 indicators used in the analysis are categorical. Z ij and g Z denote respectively the individual and the j
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Elena Pirani, Silvana Salvini, Cond
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INFORMAZIONI PER GLI AUTORI REGOLE
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Trivellato U. 1990. Modelli di comp
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SOCIETÀ E RIVISTA ADERENTI AL SIST
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