Exploring The Determinants Of Unhappiness For Ethnic Minority Men In Britain
| Published date | 01 September 2002 |
| Date | 01 September 2002 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9485.00241 |
EXPLORING THE DETERMINANTS OF
UNHAPPINESS FOR ETHNIC MINORITY MEN
IN BRITAIN
Michael A. Shields *and Allan Wailoo**
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the determinants of unhappiness for ethnic minority men living
in Britain, and compares these findings with those for White males. Data is drawn
from the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities conducted in 1994, which
has the advantage of over-sampling members of Britain’s ethnic minority
population. Using this unique data source we are able to provide some of the
first evidence of the psychological impact of unemployment, low levels of household
income, residing in an ethnic enclave and living in fear of racial harassment for
Black Caribbean and South Asian men.
II
NTRODUCTION
Twenty-five years after the Race Relations Act (1976) was introduced in Britain
many ethnic minority groups continue to be associated with economic and social
disadvantage (Blackaby et al., 1998; Modood et al., 1997). High levels of
unemployment are perhaps the most prominent example of this disadvantage,
with Blackaby et al. (1997, 1999) finding that unemployment rates amongst
ethnic minorities in general were consistently double that of Whites and that a
hierarchy of unemployment exists across minority groups. In particular,
unemployment was found to be highest for Blacks (both of Caribbean and
African origin), followed, in turn, by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, Indians,
Other Asians and then Whites. Other research has shown that those ethnic
minorities who are employed in Britain generally receive significantly lower
wages (Blackaby et al., 1994, 2001; Shields and Wheatley Price, 1998, 2001a) and
obtain fewer promotion and training opportunities than their White counter-
parts (Pudney and Shields, 2000a, 2000b; Shields and Wheatley Price, 1999;
Stewart, 1983). They also tend to be concentrated in areas of economic
disadvantage (often termed ‘ethnic enclaves’) (Fieldhouse and Gould, 1998), and
have less access to health and welfare services (Modood et al., 1997; Smaje and
Le Grand, 1997). Recent high profile investigations, most notably into issues of
Scottish Journal of Political Economy,Vol.49,No.4,September2002
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445
*University of Melbourne
**University of Sheffield
‘institutional racism’ in the Police (e.g. the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, 1999) and
in the Armed Forces, and into racial harassment at the workplace in the NHS
(see Shields and Wheatley Price, 2001b) and at Ford’s Dagenham Plant, have
further served to highlight the extent to which ethnic discrimination still remains
an important issue in Britain.1
The contribution of this paper is to quantify the extent to which both
economic and non-economic factors impact on the self-reported unhappiness (or
psychological wellbeing) of two broadly defined ethnic minority groups (Black
Caribbeans and South Asians), and to compare the results to those for Whites.
Using data from the Fourth Survey of Ethnic Minorities collected by the Policy
Studies Institute in 1994, which has the advantage of over-sampling Britain’s
ethnic minorities, we use a range of personal, work-related, demographic and
ethnicity-specific explanatory variables to estimate ordered probit models of
unhappiness.
The structure of the paper is as follows. Section II reviews the existing
economic literature that has investigated the determinants of (un)happiness. In
Section III we introduce our unique data source. Our empirical models are
described in Section IV, and the results are discussed in Section V. We conclude
the paper in Section VI.
II A REVIEW OF THE DETERMINANTS OF HAPPINESS LITERATURE
The investigation of the factors affecting human happiness is central to the
discipline of psychology.2Psychologists recognise that the best method to gain
information about how ‘happy’ a person is with their life or work is to ask them
directly. In contrast, it is well known that economists have traditionally been
reluctant to use self-reported subjective measures of utility such as happiness, life
satisfaction and job satisfaction. Economists are cautious about the interpreta-
tion of such variables and the validity of inter-personal comparisons (i.e. a
cardinal measure). Moreover, economic theory typically provides little guidance
on how to model such psychological outcomes, thus making the testing of
economic theory difficult (Jahoda, 1982, 1988). Recent years, however, have
seen a considerable increase in the willingness by economists to use such
variables (See Oswald 1997, for an informative review). This is partly due to the
high level of explanatory power attributable to such variables in models of
labour market behaviour (e.g. absenteeism and turnover) and the ‘sensible’
nature of estimated determinants of happiness. Moreover, the great advantage
of these wellbeing measures is that they provide directly observable proxies for
‘utility’, which is a concept central to economic research, but is a dependent
variable otherwise scarcely available for empirical analysis.
1Good examples of descriptive studies, which summarise the literature on racial harassment
and racial violence across many aspects of society, are FitzGerald and Hale (1996), Sibbitt
(1997) and Virdee (1995). Fuller details of the laws appropriate to racial harassment can be
found at the Commission for Racial Equality website at http://www.cre.gov.uk
2We follow the existing literature by using the terms ‘happiness’, ‘psychological well-being’
and ‘life satisfaction’ interchangeably throughout this section.
446 MICHAEL A. SHIELDS AND ALLAN WAILOO
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