Abstract
This paper aims to develop a youth well-being index that builds on the Human Development Index and the human development approach of Amartya Sen and focuses on the well-being of young Palestinian refugees from Lebanon (PRL) and Palestinian refugees from Syria living in Lebanon (PRS). The Youth Well-being Index (YWBI) expands existing well-being measurements to cover non-nationals for the first time with a focus on young people in an attempt to develop more inclusive national and international strategies and policies. The YWBI was developed to address the specificities of refugee youth to allow international humanitarian and development agencies to compare aspects of refugee well-being across different fields and comparable countries. Using micro data from the 2015 socio-economic survey of Palestinian refugees conducted in Lebanon, the newly devised index measures well-being along various dimensions including education, health, housing, employment and access to information. The index results across sub-regions and refugee groups suggest that a richer and more holistic measure of the human development of refugee youth could be used for a more efficient and equitable targeting of scarce assistance funds.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Female-Specific YWBI
The literature on the measurement of well-being sheds light on the impact of teenage parenting on the well-being of mothers and their children. In general, the literature has shown that teenage mothers, compared to older mothers (i.e. in their twenties) experience less favorable outcomes in terms of education, economics, family and personal variables.
Bradley, Cupples and Irvine (2002) have found that compared to girls from similar backgrounds, teenage mothers had lower educational attainment and employment rates. They were less likely to complete high school (Chase‐Lansdale, Brooks‐Gunn and Zamsky, 1994) or enroll in post-secondary education (Luster and Mittelstaedt 1993) and completed lower levels of formal education (Nanchahal K 2005). Also, Teenage mothers were found to have less favorable outcomes in terms of being employed, having stable employment and therefore more likely to experience poverty and receive welfare for long periods of time (Hayes 1987; Chase‐Lansdale, Brooks‐Gunn and Zamsky 1994; Furstenberg 2003).
On a psychological level, teenage mothers were found to be more likely to suffer from general and mental health problems as well as psychiatric symptoms (Leadbeater, Bishop and Raver 1996; Williams et al. 1997).
While the outcomes of teenage mothers have been heavily addressed by the literature, this dimension has not been often incorporated in the measurement of well-being in general or youth well-being specifically. We have identified two instances where this dimension was included as a determinant of youth well-being:
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The Child and Youth Well-Being Index (CWI) (2014) is a yearly index published since 1975 by Duke University which provides a comprehensive measure of the well-being of children and youth in the United States. The overall CWI includes 28 key indicators organized into seven Quality-of-Life/Well-Being Domains (Family Economic Well-Being Domain, Safe/Risky Behavior Domain, Social Relationships Domain, Emotional/Spiritual Well-Being Domain, Community Engagement Domain, Educational Attainment Domain, and Health Domain). Teenage mothers were included in the Safe/Risky Behavior Domain by accounting for teenage birth rates for those between 10 and 17 years of age using state-level averages.
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The Adolescent Girls Multi-level Vulnerability Index was published by UNICEF (2013) and measures deprivation and inequality for adolescent girls in Uganda. It included three domains: individual, household and community. The individual level domain included three indicators of relevance to teenage mothers: currently pregnant or ever given birth, currently married and high-risk sexual activity: multiple partners, sex under the age of 15.
Incorporating Teenage Motherhood in the YWBI
Based on the literature, a teenage mother dimension was incorporated in the YWBI and was developed for female youth only. As our index covers the youth population, the term teenage is used to refer to female youth between the ages of 15 and 17. The dimension includes 3 indicators: teenage females who are currently married, teenage females who reported being pregnant at the time of the survey and youth mothers who gave birth to any of their children when they were below 18. A female is considered deprived if any of the three indicators apply to her.
The distribution of teenage youth mothers versus non-teenage youth mother across the original YWBI score quintiles is compatible with the literature that teenage mothers have worse well-being outcomes than non-teenage mothers.
For both PRL and PRS, teenage mothers are heavily concentrated in the bottom 2 score quintiles of the YWBI: 42% and 38% of PRL teenage mothers and 55% and 28% of PRS teenage mothers are in first and second lowest score quintiles. On the other hand, only 20% and 19% of PRL non-teenage mothers and 23% and 16% of PRS non-teenage mothers are in first and second lowest score quintiles (Fig. 7).
The dimension was added to the original YWBI dimensions to create the female-specific YWBI and its indicators were constructed and expressed such that they present positive aspects of youth well-being (Table 7).
Similar to the results of the YWBI, mean scores of the female-specific YWBI for PRL exceed those of PRS. The overall mean score was 0.7 for PRL and 0.62 for PRS while the mean scores for the teenage mother dimension were 0.99 for PRL and 0.98 for PRS female youth (Table 8).
Results of this section are only useful in the development of a female-specific YWBI but should not be used to determine the prevalence of teenage motherhood among PRL and PRS as they are based on a small sample of n = 61 for PRL and n = 50 for PRS (3.55% of PRL and 5.96% of PRS female youth were respectively considered teenage mothers based on our constructed dimension). No mean score disaggregation by region and age group were done for the dimension due to the very small sample size. Such disaggregation was only done for the overall scores of the female-specific YWBI. Also, the inclusion of the teenage mother dimension portrays youth as better off in general compared to the original YWBI as it results in an overall increase in well-being (in the teenage mother dimension, very few are teenage mothers, scoring 0 in the dimension, and therefore well-being increases). Accordingly, YWBI and female-specific YWBI overall scores should not be compared (as they are not based on the same dimensions).
PRL female youth register the highest index score in CLA (0.73) and the lowest in North Lebanon Area (NLA) (0.66). PRS female youth register the highest overall score in Saida (0.65) and the lowest in Tyre, NLA and Bekaa (0.6) (Table 9).
For both PRL and PRS female youth, well-being significantly decreases with age. For PRL, the 15–19 age groups had an overall score of 0.74, followed by a score of 0.7 for the 20–24 age group, and a score of 0.62 for the 25–29 age group. For PRS, the 15–19 age group scores 0.65 followed by 0.63 for the 20–24 age group and 0.58 for the 25–29 age group (Table 10).
Camp residence has no statistically significant effect on well-being based on the female-specific YWBI (table 11).
See Fig. 7 and Tables 7, 8, 910 and 11.
Distribution of PRL and PRS teenage and non-teenage mother across YWBI score quintiles (in %)
Appendix 2:
See Table
12.
Appendix 3: YWBI two-sample tests for PRL and PRS
A two-sample t-test was used to test whether the YWBI score distribution and monthly per capita expenditure distribution was significantly different for PRL and PRS youth. In both cases, the two-sided null hypothesis (diff = mean PRL—mean PRS; Ho: diff = 0; Ha: diff! = 0) and the one-sided null hypothesis (Ho: diff < 0; Ha: diff > 0) were rejected (Tables 13 and 14).
As the normality assumption is violated for both distributions, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) test was run for further validation. Unlike the t-test, the KS test does not assume the data follows a certain distribution. Similar to the t-tests, the KS test results show that we can reject meanPRL-meanPRS < 0 (first line in table 15 and 16 with p-value of 1 and 0.996 respectively), fail to reject that meanPRL-meanPRS > 0 (second line with p-value of 0 for both) and fail to reject that both PRL and PRS follow the same distribution.
15 and
16.
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Salti, N., Chaaban, J., Irani, A. et al. A Multi-Dimensional Measure of Well-being among Youth: The Case of Palestinian Refugee Youth in Lebanon. Soc Indic Res 154, 1–34 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02534-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02534-1