MENTAL HEALTH AND LIFE SATISFACTION OF YOUNG AUSTRALIANS: THE ROLE OF FAMILY BACKGROUND *

This paper uses the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to investigate the factors that influence young Australians' mental health and life satisfaction, with an emphasis upon the role of family background. It also explores male and female differences concerning those background effects. The results indicate a particularly significant negative association between parental divorce and well-being, and suggest that the timing of divorce matters. Distinguishing the samples by gender shows that this relationship remains significant only for females. Past living arrangements consistently turn out to be statistically insignificant whether the sample used is the total, males or females. The current living arrangements, however, appear to be significantly associated with both mental health and life satisfaction of males. Adding potentially confounding characteristics to our basic regression, which includes only the family background variables, suggests that some of the 'aggregate' effects of family background might work indirectly through the mediating variables such as education or lifestyles, though most of them remain direct. Among those, marital status, education, labour market experience and lifestyles seem to be the major factors explaining the dispersion in well-being of young Australians. Income and wealth, on the other hand, have only a minor impact. Copyright 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/University of Adelaide and Flinders University.

The failings of political parties: reality or perception?

This article reflects on the current performance of political parties in the UK, using Alan Ware's conceptual distinction between democracy as a means of interest optimalisation, democracy as a way of fostering civic orientation among citizens, and democracy as a mechanism of popular choice and control of government. Seen from either of the first two perspectives, parties appear to be largely failing democracy, but they remain important mechanisms by which a significant degree of popular choice and control can be achieved. Even here, however, they are more challenged and less appreciated than was once the case, though this may reflect changes in popular perception more than a shift in the actual performance of parties. That being the case, it is not clear that institutional reforms which aim to improve party performance will necessarily achieve their goal

Natural genetic variation of the cardiac transcriptome in non-diseased donors and patients with dilated cardiomyopathy

10.1186/s13059-017-1286-zGenome Biology181170GNBL