Sen's Capability and Functionings: A fuzzy system to evaluate how parents interact with their children

This paper follows in the study of the building of children' social interaction with parents using the capability approach. Parents' role in child well being is well documented by evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis, here we will try to put in relation and to come to a measure of different factors that can affect its development. We propose a fuzzy expert system to measure this capability both at a theoretical and empirical level. The applied part of the paper use a data set based on a matched data source of ISTAT (Italian National Statistical Office 2008) multipurpose survey on family and on children condition in Italy to recover information on children’s education, the socio-demographic structure of their families, child care provided by relatives and parents according to the type of activities in which the children are involved, and Bank of Italy Survey on household income and wealth year 2008 (SHIW08) to control how family income may enter in the final evaluation This is one step of a more complex system allowing for a richer set of indicators and of dimension of child well being as well as for their interaction. This paper is included in an international project "Measuring Interaction between Quality of Life, Children Well-Being, Work And Public Policies" supported by Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena.