The purpose of the Sociobarometer is to produce an expert evaluation on the welfare of citizens and on the present state of welfare services in Finland. In The Sociobarometer, the special emphasis is on analysing the development in the last few years. In the sense of research, attention is paid mainly to three questions.

How has the welfare of citizens and different groups of people changed?

How well have the producers of welfare services recognised the change, and how have they reacted to it on the level of forms and resources of action?

How does the development of regional differentiation relate to welfare?

The Sociobarometer is a report on current issues. It is not a piece of research in the traditional sense: central concepts, like welfare, welfare services, subsistence, social safety, social welfare support, or regional differentiation, are not explicitly deduced from sociological theories and then converted into operational forms. However, the data is handled and analysed according to the tradition of quantitative studies. The shaping of social phenomena into concepts and into an operational form has been team work of the research group. It has been based on experience gained during a long time. The development work and many research experiments of The Sociobarometer have been described in connection with various academic theses and other pieces of research.

The Sociobarometer has been produced since 1991. 1) In the first years, it was basically just a report on current issues. Later, it has also been developed as a describer of change. This has required uniformity of questions asked and production of temporal series, both from the data as a whole and from the answers provided by various groups of people. Depending on the group of respondents, comparable data has been collected since 1995, 1996 or 1998.

The Sociobarometer is carried out as a questionnaire interview everywhere in Finland. The respondents are leaders of local social and health services, local employment offices and the offices of The Social Insurance Institution, and the most essential organisations of the social and health field. Thus the questionnaire is targeted to the leaders of instances that produce welfare services. These people have the clearest and widest possible view of the situation in their sector and region of action. Their view-points differ slightly from each other. Public producers of services evaluate welfare in a certain region, town or municipality. The view-point of organisations is national and concerns mainly their own members or clients.

1) First, the questionnaires were posted to some leaders in local social offices and in organisations of the social and health field. All-inclusive studies were started in 1995. Employment offices and local offices of the National Insurance Institution were included for the first time in 1996. In 1998, the group of respondents was extended by adding leaders of health centres.

Since the middle of the 1990’s, there has been a continuous period of growth in the Finnish economy. This growth did not, however, start improving the welfare of citizens immediately. The weakening of welfare, which had been caused by the economic depression at the beginning of the 1990’s, seemed to go on despite the growth. A clear change occurred in 1998. The development of citizens’ welfare took a positive direction which continued for a few years. This improvement of welfare is now slowing down. The message of The Sociobarometer 2001 about the period we have just gone through contains four characteristics that require attention in social policy. First, the improvement of welfare has aided a great majority of the population. Many groups of people have benefited of the consequences of economic growth, and the general image is positive. Good results of social change and economic growth should be further divided to the whole population.

The second characteristic is connected to growing differentiation. It also contains an interpretation of change that goes into two directions. Some towns and municipalities have a good ability to take care of their citizens’ welfare. They are able to react to the changing situation. In some other towns and municipalities, however, the conditions are problematic. There, the authorities have become unable to take care of the citizen’s welfare and to respond to people’s service needs with weakening resources.

The general image of development is further coloured by two additional characteristics, which both require well-directed socio-political measures. Because of changes in production and at the labour market – as well as of migration and globalisation – some citizens who have experienced these strong structural changes have not been able to keep up with them. Nor have support systems of the society been capable of changing accordingly. The foundation of subsistence of various groups that are in practice permanently without paid work is weakening. Thus the opportunities of these people to participate in various things in society are decreasing. In such situations, risks increase, and the threat of exclusion grows. Exclusion occurs for instance through poverty, passivity, intoxicant abuse, psychiatric problems, and other defects in life-management. All these are consequences of structural changes that have occurred in society. The changes require attention so that their harmful effects can be corrected. A further problematic characteristic is connected to the results of changes in production and economy. It comes up as an increase in serious difficulties of socialisation, such as lack of human commitments, insecurity of children and adolescents, unemployment of young people, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and psychiatric problems.

The present state of social development raises a discussion on the position of welfare society, the ethical values of social policy, and the targeting of society’s measures. Strong positive development in the lives of large groups of people shows that many solutions in social policy have been successful. But does this development reflect justice and equality? Its selective nature also causes conflicts between various groups and areas in a way that creates unhealthy competition, intolerance, and selfish lobbying for people’s private interests. The principles of welfare society – shared responsibility, social welfare support, and caring for each other – are forgotten. Social and human values should be considered together with economic ones. During the last 10-year period, economic trends have become detached from social and human development. If social and economic development are not considered simultaneously, there is a danger that these two development factors – even though they need each other – become too distant. The growing distance between social and economic arenas begins to cause problems that threaten the safe and predictable development of society. By emphasising justice and equality, the Finnish welfare society must try to get human, social, and economic trends of development closer to each other. Interventions of social policy, too, have such a task. We are living a period of change, in which social welfare support and the sharing of responsibility should be openly increased.

The picture of the existing welfare of citizens is clearer than before. A great section of the population is doing better than before. This change is now becoming slower. The positive effects of the growth of welfare are visible in groups of people whose lives and positions at the labour market are on a steady basis, for instance married people, families with children, people with permanent jobs, and pensioners.

Figure 2. The profile of population groups.

As far as social political conclusions are concerned, positive development shows that the systems of social services and social security work. Still, there are restrictions to these positive results. More attention should be paid to the situation of the young, single-parents, and people of more than 75 years of age. Particularly in the integration of the young into society, there are risks that also exist in the formation of other people’s welfare. If we invest on supporting the young now, we can avoid social problems later. The problems of single-parents raise questions on such defects of economic and social welfare support that households of one parent can experience. Taking care that children are socially secured is both humanly and economically profitable.

Among the elderly, there has been differentiation of welfare. The situation is good for old people under 75 years, but the welfare of those who are older than 75 years has begun to decrease. When we think of the future, such development is dangerous. The increasing need of support means that people over 75 years of age are more dependent on welfare services. Especially among persons with small income, this problem gets emphasis. The preservation of dignity at old age requires a human system of social welfare with a great variety of services. At the moment, there are signals of gaps in the support and service system. Small income and an increase in the need of support lead to a strong dependency on the public network of social security.

Differences of welfare between different groups are increasing. Those with a stigma of exclusion are on the losing side, for instance people who misuse intoxicants, have psychiatric problems, or have been unemployed for a long time. The danger of losing welfare increases when various other social risks pile up to the same people. Problems of poverty and subsistence are also connected to exclusion. The question is of consequences of a social structural change and of increasing risks for people’s lives to change from stable and predictable situations into insecure and unpredictable ones. People should not refuse to perceive this social change. It would be important to strengthen policies to prevent these risks and to correct the consequences of existing problems.

Figure 3. Welfare in different groups and how to guarantee sufficient social and health services. 2)

In our results, one example of a dangerous problem is drug abuse. It concerns both towns and the countryside. Drugs seem to be a problem for which the welfare service system has not found sufficient solutions yet. The lack of solutions is visible as a lack or inefficiency of measures to cure drug addicts and as imprecision of methods for the preventative fight against drug abuse.

2) The cluster analysis was used in the description of the well-being of the population groups facing different phases of life. The assessments of welfare in 2001 given by every service provider (n=638) were included. In 2000 there were 605 respondents included. The most descrip-tive result was gained by dividing them into five groups.

Changes in production and in the structure of the labour market as well as globalisation have increased the importance of employment-centred thinking in the ethical world of social policy. Such groups of people are successful who have found their places at the labour market. Other ones whose members have no jobs are ending up closer to exclusion. People’s opportunities for welfare are defined by the question whether they are permanently successful at the labour market or not.

Results of The Sociobarometer 2001 show that the possibilities of employment administration to work efficiently have become narrower. The authorities have no means for solving the present social problem of long-term and/or repeated unemployment and of people with deficient working skills. For individuals, long-term unemployment means difficulties in integration into society, life-management, participation, and subsistence. Generally speaking, unemployment has decreased, employment rates have improved, and there is even shortage of labour at some fields of work. On the basis of these changes, resources and different methods of employment administration to help job applicants with special employment problems have been decreased. Yet for members of special groups that are difficult to employ, consequences of unemployment have not become easier: all in all, their situation has become worse. However, unemployment seems to have lost some of its importance as a political question. Yet, in order to solve the unemployment problems that are becoming more and more difficult, attention must be paid to them across sector borders. Co-operative forms of action must be developed further, and existing resources must be more clearly targeted to improving the position of people who are less successful at the labour market. Local and national authorities and actors of non-governmental organisations must – together with citizens themselves – go on sharing responsibility, co-operating to provide support to people, and looking for methods for this work.

In the middle of the 1990’s, the socio-economic position of towns and municipalities was problematic. Towards the end of the decade, the development clearly took a positive direction. At the turn of the millennium, however, a new, worse change seems to have occurred. Positive development has stopped now. The number of towns and municipalities in a progressive socio-economic position has decreased to some extent, and more municipalities are in a problematic position than before.

The process nature of regional differentiation makes it difficult to evaluate the cause and effect relations in it or to influence on its development. For instance, the problematic position of some municipalities is both a cause and an effect of migration. Selective migration decreases both social and economic resources at the regions that people leave. In those areas, the narrowing structure of population is a problem that makes it difficult to keep up welfare and different services. The message of Sociobarometer 2001 is clear. Towns and municipalities cannot solve this problem alone. Even now we can see that the ability of many municipalities to keep up a service structure that is considered necessary and thus to take care of the welfare of their inhabitants has seriously decreased. On the basis of the results of this barometer, we can estimate that the number of regions in the most difficult position has doubled, and that there are about 350 000 Finns living in these areas.

Figure 4. The socio-economic position of municipalities.3)

Translation: Satu Linna, HTML Conversion: Mikko Kärmeniemi