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The analysis of inequality in cities has a wide tradition, from the analysis of urban areas through factorial ecology of the Chicago School to contemporary studies on 'urban vulnerability'. From an operative point of view, its main objective has been to elaborate a synthetic index that allows to place to the urban areas in a continuum with respect to the resources that own its residents and/or the risks that they face. This paper presents a proposal to measure the socioeconomic level of urban areas and its validation. First, some basic aspect in the analysis of urban inequalities are reviewed. Then, the proposal is presented and validated, and finally, some few conclusions about the proposal and its limitations are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the inter-linguistic and intercultural comparability of subjective wellbeing during adolescence, as well as school satisfaction as a component of this well-being, using samples of 12 to 16-year-old from Brazil (n=1588), Chile (n=843) and Spain (n=2900). As subjective well-being indicators, two versions of the PWI (Cummins, Eckersley, van Pallant, Vugt, and Misajon, 2003) were adopted, one measuring well-being with different life domains, a single-item scale on overall life satisfaction (OLS). The six items on satisfaction with different facets of the school life, used by Casas et al. (2013), were included as subjective indicators of school satisfaction. The original version of the PWI (PWI7) and a longer version with 10 items (PWI10) are used. Both versions show a good fit in Confirmatory Factor Analysis using the pooled sample. Using multiple regressions analysis and Structural Equations Modelling (SEM), different options are considered and analyzed in order to estimate the most appropriate model to compare subjective wellbeing cross-countries, with school satisfaction included. An analysis of the results indicates that two multi-group SEM, which include the six items on satisfaction with different facets of school life related to a latent variable, and also related to latent variables PWI7 and PWI10, respectively, show good comparability between countries. Multiple regression analysis suggests that the most useful synthetic indicator on satisfaction with school life is satisfaction with your life as student. When this item is included in PWI7 or PWI10, internal consistency of each of the scales (PWI8 and PWI11) improves, and the respective multi-group SEM of these two psychometric scales show that variances, covariances and regressions are comparable between the three studied countries. This was not the case with the overall mean indices, which is probably due to the different answering styles of adolescents in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]