This dissertation explores children’s (6-8 years old) perspectives and experiences of well-being in two different cultural contexts: in a Tibetan day-school (India) and in a German day-school (Germany). Ethnographic research was conducted with participants of a second-grade class (mixed gender) for six months at each site, 3-4 days a week in 2012. Participant observation was complemented by interviews with the children as well as with the staff of the school, documented by fieldnotes and sound recordings. Data was collected in line with postmodern grounded theory methodology and preliminary analysis accompanied the process of the fieldwork. The thesis explores the children’s views and social practices related to well-being which prove to be different in both cultures: the Tibetan children emphasized being skilful as a basic condition for well-being, while friendship with peers was most important at the German school. At both sites, the children would establish these conditions for well-being through competitions. Furthermore, the children’s different views and the social practices are considered against the backdrop of two ‘transcultural’ indicators of well-being: self-confidence and resilience. These indicators were not selected randomly but chosen inductively during fieldwork, as the difference in self-confidence and resilience between the children’s groups at each site was noticeable. The thesis demonstrates how these differences in self-confidence and resilience are likely to have been related to a) the children’s particular views and social practices linked to well-being b) the manner in which childhood is constructed within the children’s societies and c) particular basic beliefs and worldviews prevalent within the children’s societies. The results emphasize the usefulness of researching well-being cross-culturally and suggest that (socio-culturally specific) self- and worldviews significantly influence children’s well-being.

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No. of bitstreams: 1 72070100769.pdf: 1516401 bytes, checksum: cdec66534b52e48dc6c4ebe76b189ac0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-02-15 / This work consists of three essays organized into chapters that seek to answer questions at first sight unrelated, but with one common denominator, which is the scarcity of public resources devoted to education, overall, especially in lower education. . The first chapter deals with the scarcity of resources devoted to education in a context of population aging. Two hypotheses were tested for Brazilian municipalities on the relationship between the aging of the population and educational expenditure. The first, already proven in the literature, is that there is an intergenerational conflict for resources and the increase of the share of elderly in the population reduces the educational expenditure. The second, proposed here for the first time, is that there should be reduction of competition for resources if there is a relationship of co-residence between young and old. The results indicated that an increase in the share of elderly reduces the educational expenditure per youth. But the results also illustrate that an increase in the share of elderly co-residing with youth (family arrangement more common in Latin American countries) raises the educational expenditure, which reflects a reduction of competition for resources between generations. The second chapter assesses the allocative efficiency of investments in Higher Education. Using the difference between first-year and last-year students’ scores from Enade aggregated by HEI as a product in the Stochastic Production Function, is possible to contribute with a new element in the literature aimed at estimating the production function of education. The results show that characteristics of institutions are the variables that best explain the performance of students, and that public institutions are more inefficient than the private ones. Finally, the third chapter presents evidence that the allocation of public resources in early childhood education is important for a better future school performance. In this chapter was calculated the effects of early childhood education on literacy scores of children attending the 2nd grade of elementary school. The results using OLS and propensity score matching show that students who started school at the ages to 5, 4, and 3 years had literacy scores between 12.22 and 19.54 points higher than the scores of those who began school at the ages 6 years or late. The results also suggest that the returns in terms of literacy scores diminish in relation to the number of years of early childhood education. / Este trabalho é composto por três ensaios organizados em capítulos que buscam responder questões a uma primeira vista independentes, mas com um denominador comum, que é a escassez de recursos públicos destinados à educação. O primeiro ensaio trata da escassez de recursos voltados à educação em um contexto de envelhecimento populacional. Foram testadas duas hipóteses sobre a relação entre o envelhecimento populacional e os gastos em educação. A primeira, já presente comprovada na literatura, é a de que há uma disputa intergeracional por recursos e o aumento na proporção de idosos reduz os gastos em educação. A segunda, proposta aqui pela primeira vez, é a de que deve haver redução dessa disputa por recursos se houver uma relação de co-residência entre jovens e idosos. Os resultados indicaram que um aumento no percentual de idosos, de fato, reduz os gastos por jovem em educação. Mas também foram encontradas evidências de que conforme aumenta a proporção de jovens e idosos co-residindo (arranjo familiar mais comum em países lationo-americanos), aumentam os gastos em educação, o que reflete uma atenuação da disputa intergeracional por recursos. O segundo capítulo avalia a eficiência alocativa dos investimentos realizados no Ensino Superior. Utilizando a diferença entre os escores de alunos ingressantes e concluintes do Enade agregados por IES como produto na Função de Produção Estocástica, foi possível contribuir com um elemento novo na literatura voltada à estimação de Função de Produção de Educação. Os resultados mostraram que as características das instituições são as variáveis que melhor explicam o desempenho. Adicionalmente, as instituições públicas são mais ineficientes que as privadas. Por fim, o terceiro capítulo apresenta evidências de que a alocação de recursos públicos na Educação Infantil é importante para um melhor desempenho escolar futuro. Nesse capítulo foram calculados os efeitos da educação infantil sobre os escores de alfabetização das crianças do 2º ano do Ensino Fundamental. Os resultados encontrados com o uso de OLS e de Propensity Score Matching mostram que alunos que ingressaram com 5, 4, e 3 ou menos anos de idade, obtiveram escores de alfabetização entre 12,22 e 19,54 pontos a mais do que os que ingressaram na escola com 6 anos ou mais. Os resultados também sugerem que os retornos são decrescentes em relação ao tempo de Educação Infantil.