Social capital is defined as the individual’s pool of social resources found in his/her personal network. A recent study on Italians living as couples has shown that friendship relationships, beyond those within an individual’s family, are an important source of support. Here, we used data from Aspects of Daily Life, the Italian National Statistical Institute’s 2012 multipurpose survey, to analyze the relation between friendship ties and life satisfaction. Our results show that friendship, in terms of intensity (measured by the frequency with which individuals see their friends) and quality (measured by the satisfaction with friendship relationships), is positively associated to life satisfaction.

No abstract

Family resources may play an important role in the wellbeing of older people. In this paper, we examine the association between living arrangement and cognitive decline among people over 65 living in different European countries. The underlined hypothesis is that living with others (i.e. spouse or/and children) vis-à-vis living alone may have a positive role in maintaining cognitive functioning, but also that such beneficial influence varies according to the circumstances. To this end, we used data from the first two waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which provides indicators of several cognitive functions: orientation, immediate recall, delayed recall, verbal fluency and numeracy. Net of both the potential biases due to the selective attrition and the re-test effects, the evidence shows that the association between living arrangement and cognitive decline depends on the geographical area and on the starting level of cognitive function.

No abstract

Abstract:The literature has suggested that students' progress at university is influenced by their personal characteristics; this paper examines whether these factors act differently according to the study fields of degree courses in which students are enrolled. In particular, the factors influencing the various outcomes of the university programme (withdrawals, course changes, delays, completion of degrees) in three-year degree courses in a large Italian university are analysed from the perspective of study fields. We examined the records of over 32,000 students enrolling from academic years 2002/03 to 2005/06 in 84 first-cycle degree courses, grouped in four different fields of study. Analyses were conducted by considering the time dimension within the methodological approach of survival analysis, by means of individual longitudinal data from university administrative archives. A discrete-time method for competing risks event history analysis was applied to study the determinants of university outcomes in the various fields of study.