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Youth Activities and Children’s Subjective Well-Being in Korea

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Abstract

This paper studies whether children’s participation in youth activities affects subjective well-being (SWB). We exploit a nationally representative longitudinal survey, the Korea Children and Youth Panel Survey waves 2010 and 2012, to conduct our analysis. Three measures of SWB, happiness, joy, and worry, are in use in this study. The respondents were in grade 1 of middle school (age 13) in 2010 and grade 3 in 2012. The fixed effects regressions show that longer participation hours associate with higher overall happiness and more joy, but do not significantly correlate with worry. Moreover, some activities such as adventure and environment programs associate with a higher level of SWB than other programs or activities do. We also find that various environmental factors affect children’s SWB.

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Notes

  1. Some researchers may have different results; e.g., Rees (2017) does not find evidence of an unusually strong emphasis on education outside school among 12-year-old students in Korea however, the author admits that it may not represent the fact, since students report a relatively low frequency of all activities, compared to most other countries.

  2. The "Free Semester Program" operated as a pilot during 2013 and 2015, and then became a formal program nationwide in 2016.

  3. Some researchers treat some of those environmental variables (particularly children relationship with parents and classmates) as indicators of one dimension of children well-being: relational well-being, which is different from subjective well-being. See Bradshaw and Richardson (2009) and Bradshaw et al. (2011) for references.

  4. One-hour increase in total participation hours from the mean value (14.527 h) means 0.069 (= 1/14.527) unit increase in log participation hours (or 6.9 percentage points increase in participation hours). The corresponding change in happiness is thus 0.069 * 0.026 = 0.0018 unit.

  5. Note that the independent variable “Log participation hours” is actually ln(1 + hours) so that we can convert zero participation hour into zero in “Log participation hours.” The change from 25th percentile (1 h) of participation to the 50th percentile (8 h) is associated with change in the independent variable ln(1 + 8) − ln(1 + 1) = 1.504. The corresponding change in happiness is thus equal to 1.504 * 0.026 = 0.039. Similarly, we have [ln(1 + 21) − ln(1 + 1)] * 0.026 = 0.062 unit change in happiness for the change from 25th percentile (1 h) to 75th percentile (21 h) of participation hours.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KDI School of Public Policy and Management, 263 Nansejong-ro, Sejong, Korea

    Kyoungmi Park & Shun Wang

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  1. Kyoungmi Park
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  2. Shun Wang
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Correspondence to Shun Wang.

Appendix

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See Table 6.

Table 6 Youth living environment
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Park, K., Wang, S. Youth Activities and Children’s Subjective Well-Being in Korea. J Happiness Stud 20, 2351–2365 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-018-0048-2

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