The Set-Point Theory of Well-Being: Negative Results and Consequent Revisions

An adequate theory of happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) needs to link at least three sets of variables: stable person characteristics (including personality traits), life events and measures of well-being (life satisfaction, positive affects) and ill-being (anxiety, depression, negative affects). It also needs to be based on long-term data in order to account for long-term change in SWB. By including personality measures in the 2005 survey, the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) became the first available dataset to provide long-term evidence about personality and change in one key measure of SWB, namely life satisfaction. Using these data, the paper suggests major revisions to the set-point theory of SWB; revisions which seek to account for long-term change. Previously, theory focused on evidence that individuals have their own set-point of SWB and revert to that set-point once the psychological impact of major life events has dissipated. But the new SOEP panel data show that significant minorities record substantial and apparently permanent upward or downward changes in life satisfaction. The paper aims to explain why most people’s SWB levels do not change, but why a minority do. The main new result, which must be regarded as tentative until replicated, is that the people most likely to record large changes in life satisfaction are those who score high on the personality traits of extraversion (E) and/or neuroticism (N). These people in a sense ‘roll the dice’ more often than others and so have a higher than average probability of recording long-term changes. Data come from the 3130 SOEP respondents who rated their life satisfaction every year from 1985 onwards, among whom 2843 also completed a set of questions about their personality in 2005.

Personal and Planetary Well-being: Mindfulness Meditation,Pro-environmental Behavior and Personal Quality of Life in a Survey from the Social Justice and Ecological Sustainability Movement

Employing data from a mailed survey of a sample of ecologically and spiritually aware respondents (N = 829), the study tests the hypothesized relationship between ecologically sustainable behavior (ESB) and subjective well-being (SWB). The proposed link between ESB and SWB is the spiritual practice of mindfulness meditation (MM). In multiple regression equations ESB and MM independently explain statistically significant amounts of variance in SWB, indicating, for at least the study’s sample, that there can be a relationship between personal and planetary well-being. The inter-relationships among SWB, ESB and MM suggest that for specific segments of the general population (e.g., the spiritually inclined) there may not necessarily be an insurmountable conflict between an environmentally responsible lifestyle and personal quality of life. The research reported here also points to the potential for meditative/mindful experiences to play a prominent role in the explanation of variance in SWB, a direction in QoL studies recently highlighted by several researchers (Layard 2005, pp. 189–192; Nettle 2005, pp. 153–160; Haidt 2006).

Why Faster,Higher, Stronger isn’t Necessarily Better—The Relations of Paralympian and Women’s Soccer Teams’ Performance to National Well-being

The present study considers how the athletic performance of minority groups relates to national subjective well-being (SWB) and life expectancy. Based on the argument that sports represent a microcosm of society and the reliable finding that national inequality is associated with reduced SWB, we hypothesized that greater opportunities for typically disadvantaged groups within sports should be positively related to national indicators of well-being. Study 1 compared the relation of success in the Paralympics versus the Olympics to national subjective well-being and life expectancy. The results supported our hypothesis. In Study 2 we conceptually replicated these results using the standings of national men’s and women’s soccer teams. Overall, it appears that the opportunities to compete in sports that nations afford to members of disadvantaged groups reflect on the health and well-being of the entire society.

More Participation,Happier Society? A Comparative Study of Civil Society and the Quality of Life

A ‘good society’ has recently been portrayed as one in which citizens engage in voluntary associations to foster democratic processes. Arguably, such a good society is considered as one where people are content with their own lives as well as public life. We consider whether participation in civil society leads to more satisfied individuals on the one hand and a better evaluation of society at a country level on the other. With data from the first round of the European Social Survey, we illustrate that participation in voluntary associations not only depends on individual characteristics, but that there is a clear country-level effect on civil society. This can be explained with measures of quality of society after socio-demographic determinants have been controlled for. Nonetheless, it remains difficult to say what comes first: a ‘good society’ or a thriving civil society.

Life Goals Matter to Happiness: A Revision of Set-Point Theory

Using data from the long-running German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP), this paper provides evidence that life goals matter substantially to subjective well-being (SWB). Non-zero sum goals, which include commitment to family, friends and social and political involvement, promote life satisfaction. Zero sum goals, including commitment to career success and material gains, appear detrimental to life satisfaction. Finding that conscious life goals matter can potentially make an important contribution to SWB theory. The most widely accepted theory—set-point or dynamic equilibrium theory—essentially claims that set-points are near-automatic consequences of hereditary characteristics, including personality traits. Life goals play no role in these theories and major life events are viewed as having only a transitory effect. The SOEP panel data show that, over a 15–20 year period, non-trivial minorities record substantial changes in their set-points. This paper shows linkages between these changes and (a) the personality traits of extraversion, neuroticism and internal locus of control and (b) choice of life goals.

Environmentally Responsible Happy Nation Index: Towards an Internationally Acceptable National Success Indicator

Amidst increasing attention to happiness studies by economists, the New Economics Foundation launched in July 2006 the Happy Planet Index (Marks et al. 2006). This is the ratio of the average happy life years (HLY) to the per capita ecological footprint of the country concerned. HLY is in turn the product of the average happiness (or life satisfaction) index and the life expectancy index. Some essential revisions to this index are proposed to reach an internationally acceptable national success indicator that aims positively at long and happy lives but negatively at the external costs of environmental disruption. Hopefully, this ‘environmentally responsible happy nation index’ will lead to some re-orientation of both the market and national governments towards something more fundamentally valuable.

How Can Children Tell Us About Their Wellbeing? Exploring the Potential of Participatory Research Approaches within <Emphasis Type="Italic">Young Lives</Emphasis>

‘Wellbeing’ is a key concept in the study of children’s lives over time, given its potential to link the objective, subjective, and inter-subjective dimensions of their experiences in ways that are holistic, contextualized and longitudinal. For this reason wellbeing is one of the core concepts used by Young Lives, a 15-year project (2000–2015) that follows the lives of 12,000 children growing up in the context of poverty in Ethiopia, Peru, Vietnam and Andhra Pradesh (India) (see ). This paper examines a selection of methods being used by Young Lives to capture aspects of child wellbeing in the context of a range of children’s life experiences related to poverty, specific risks and protective processes. It draws on a review of the literature on child-focused methods and on recent experiences piloting three core qualitative methods in the four study countries. The paper reports the development of a methodology that is child-centred, but also acknowledges that every child is embedded within a network of social and economic relationships.

Measuring longevity achievements under welfare interdependencies: a case for joint life expectancy indicators

Whereas period life expectancy constitutes an intuitive indicator of the survival conditions prevailing at a particular period, this paper argues that, given the existence of welfare interdependencies, that widespread indicator is nonetheless an incomplete measure of the longevity achievements relevant for human well-being. The central importance of coexistence for human-beings implies that usual life expectancy measures should be complemented by joint life expectancy indicators, which measure the average coexistence time under particular survival conditions. After a study of the theoretical foundations of ‘single’ and ‘joint’ life expectancy indicators, it is shown that joint life expectancy measures tend to enrich significantly the comparison of longevity achievements across countries and periods. Moreover, the introduction of joint life expectancy indicators—as a complement to conventional life expectancy measures—into multi-variable indexes such as the United Nations’ HDI is also shown to affect international rankings of standards of living to a non negligible extent.

Life Satisfaction and Happiness in Turkey

This research aims to investigate life satisfaction and happiness in Turkey. It extends the previous researches on subjective well-being (SWB) for Turkey by considering both happiness and life satisfaction. The previous researches for Turkey are local studies, and their findings cannot be generalized to the population of Turkish society. Given these facts, the factors that shape individual happiness and life satisfaction amongst Turkish people are determined using a representative survey of sociocultural and political change, World Values Survey (WVS). Some results obtained in this study are similar to typical findings such as a negative age effect, positive influences of income and health status, and a negative effect of unemployment. Contrary to the expectations, middle education has a negative direct effect on life satisfaction among females, and the upper education level is insignificant in the life satisfaction model. By comparing the correlates of happiness and life satisfaction across different years, this research aims to provide insights for policy makers and professionals to improve the perceived lives of Turkish people.

Determinants of Work-life Balance: Shortcomings in the Contemporary Measurement of WLB in Large-scale Surveys

Research on work-life balance (WLB) has presented important insights into the problems of combining family aspirations with paid work in relation to policy relevant agendas. Using the ESS II (2004/2005), we examine work-related and household/family-related causes of WLB. We can corroborate other research findings that show that work-related aspects explain by far the largest part of the variation in WLB. However, we illustrate that the measurement of WLB is partly problematic. Because WLB scales conceptualize the work component more specifically than the life component, what ‘life’ means remains rather intangible apart from general references to the ‘home’, ‘housework’ and ‘family responsibilities’. This largely neglects different emic dimensions to WLB common to specific subgroups and renders the measurement rather abstract. Second, the wordings of WLB indicators already include their most probable explanations. There is the danger of a circular argument here and many explanations seem tautological. This makes it difficult to conclude on the effects of other than work-related aspects on WLB, which are, arguably, also important aspects of WLB. Finally, WLB scales hardly correlate with relevant external criteria, for instance subjective well-being. Following from these findings, we discuss what these WLB scales could really measure and propose to broaden quantitative empirical approaches to it.

The ‘What’, ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of Employee Well-Being: A New Model

This paper examines the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of employee well-being. Beginning with the ‘what’ of well-being, the construct of mental health was explored with the aim of building a model of employee well-being. It was proposed that employee well-being consists of three core components: (1) subjective well-being; (2) workplace well-being and (3) psychological well-being. Following this, the ‘why’ of employee well-being was investigated; that is, why employee well-being should be an important matter for organisations. It was argued that employee well-being is an important precursor to organisational well-being, as indicated by its links to employee turnover and performance. The next section was concerned with the ‘how’ of employee well-being; that is, how well-being can be reliably enhanced. Drawing on two models of strengths and a practice model of psychological assessment, it was asserted that strength-based development can reliably enhance employee well-being. A solid framework for understanding and measuring employee well-being is offered in the hope that it will foster a more integrated approach to assessing and optimising employee well-being.

Well-Being is a Process of Becoming: Respondent-Led Research With Organic Farmers in Madagascar

Malagasy ‘players’—farmers, middle men, organic organisations and policy makers—see in export-orientated organic agriculture a way for Madagascar to build upon its historic export strengths: spices, essential oils, medicinal plants and tropical fruits. They point to the de facto organic status of most farming in the country and view organic production strategies as a means for Malagasy farmers to differentiate their produce in the highly competitive world market (Ramboatiana and Randriamanantena 2000; Randriamanantena 1998; Vallée 2000). However, producing for the export market poses significant challenges for Malagasy farmers. Despite its apparent ‘fit’ with existing farming practice, ‘true’ certified organic practice does not necessarily offer a means towards achieving a Malagasy farmer-defined ‘good life’. Smallholders can be disempowered through their incorporation into wider systemic relationships whose more powerful actors—such as buyers and consumers—and their ‘rules’ about what ‘organic’ is, for example, are necessarily unfamiliar. Yet farmers are very interested in the significant opportunities for much-needed cash that organic farming offers. This paper argues that strengthening farmer agency, and thus their presence as actors in international food chains, can be partially achieved if farmers are involved in devising the rules for organic and social certification. I set out eight principles that I have developed which seem important when trying to capture and measure ‘quality of life’ for the purposes of social certification. My theoretical and empirical work, detailed here, is set within a methodological discussion on how to best ensure that research is ‘respondent-led’. Respondent-led research is, I argue, critical for ensuring that an understanding of the components of ‘quality of life’, and their operationalisation as standards and indicators, is truly meaningful to the target group.

Individual and institutional determinants of multidimensional poverty: A European comparison

In this article we evaluate to what extent between-country differences in the probability of being ‘multidimensional’ poor can be explained by a range of ‘domain-specific’ indicators of welfare regime arrangements. To this end, a so-called micro-macro model is estimated, testing the ‘independent’ effect of institutions, as opposed to alternative explanations such as between-country differences in population composition and economic affluence. Although we conclude that institutional arrangements do influence the risk of multidimensional poverty in the expected direction, we also find that bringing the ‘economy’ back into the analyses has a non-trivial impact. Our results point at several avenues for further discussion and research. First, although the more elaborate welfare regimes generally do a better job in preventing poverty, the level of transfers is not always ‘proportional’ to the general standard of living in these countries. Second, we only find partial confirmation for the often cited ‘negative’ impact of labour market flexibility and the related equality-jobs trade-off. While stricter employment regulations do reduce the poverty risk (be it only after controlling for economic affluence), flexibility in terms of the availability of fixed-term labour seems to be preferable to unemployment, even if at the individual level, labour market flexibility increases the likelihood of being poor quite severely.

The Differentiation of Social Demands in Europe. The Social Basis of the European Models of Capitalism

This paper tests the impact of various determinants of the preference for two key elements of the European social models: redistribution and trade unions, using individual data from the first round of the European Social Survey. The basic hypothesis is that the main determinant of an individual’s support for these elements of the European models is the social position of the individual in terms of income, status and risks attached to their labour market insertion. The paper also considers the relative importance of less ‘materialist’ influences such as religion or other cultural determinants. The estimations show that ‘materialist’ determinants are by far the most important influences on individual preferences, contrary to what most social theories of modernisation contend.

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Personal Values as Mitigating Factors in the Link Between Income and Life Satisfaction: Evidence from the European Social Survey

Using data from the first two rounds of the European Social Survey, we examine the link between income, reference income and life satisfaction across Western Europe. We find that whilst there is a strong positive relationship between income and life satisfaction, reference or comparison income exerts a strong negative influence. Interestingly, our results confirm the importance of personal values and beliefs not only as predictors of subjective well-being, but also as mitigating factors in the relationship between income, reference income and life satisfaction. While our findings provide additional empirical support for the relative utility hypothesis, they are also consistent with Rojas’ (J Econ Psychol 28:1–14, 2007) Conceptual-Referent-Theory (CRT), which is based on the premise that the salience of income and comparison income depends on one’s intrinsic values and personal beliefs.

Labor Migration,Remittances and Economic Well-being of Households in the Philippines

Labor Migration has long been viewed as a strategy adopted by the household unit to allocate family resources rationally to increase the flows of income and to raise family standard of living. The research reported here examines the extent to which remittances sent by Filipino overseas workers increase the income and standard of living of households in the Philippines. Data for the analysis were obtained from a representative sample of 2,388 households drawn in 1999–2000 from four major “labor sending” areas in the Philippines. The analysis compares households with and without overseas workers to estimate the contribution of remittances to household income and to household standard of living (measured once by an ‘objective’ indicator and once by a ‘subjective’ assessment). The data reveal that due to remittances the income of households with overseas labor migrants is considerably higher than the income of households without overseas workers. The data also reveal that remittances are used mostly for consumption purposes (e.g. purchase of food, clothing, education, and goods) and that most of the difference in standard of living (whether measured on the ‘objective’ or the ‘subjective’ scale) between households with and without overseas workers are attributed to remittances. The implications of labor migration and the policy that encourages and supports labor migration for the Filipino society are evaluated and discussed.

Reconciling the needs and wants of respondents in two rural Ethiopian communities

This paper uses the Quality of Life research carried out by the Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) Research Group to examine the importance respondents have attributed to a variety of goals in two rural communities in Ethiopia. The results are analysed at the community, household and individual levels to expose the contestation involved in expressions of goal preference at different levels, and the power relations that underlie and contribute to the formation of these goal preferences. In this way, taking communities or households as homogenous units is shown to be inaccurate and potentially misleading. Analysis of individual case studies also provides insight into the complex decision-making process where people with access to limited resources are forced to give certain goals priority depending on current exigencies. The fact that the ordering of priorities can change with time highlights the dangers of any one-off measure being considered as a time-independent picture of individuals’ goals. By relating the results of the research to Doyal and Gough’s Theory of Human Need, the paper considers to what extent ‘universal’ human needs correspond to the most important goals as expressed by respondents in the Ethiopian research. Whilst considerable support is found for needs such as health, food and shelter, several respondents in the two research sites consider needs such as education to be unnecessary. This incongruence between the priority of people’s goals and theories of need leads us to question what the aim of development should be: to assist beneficiaries in the pursuit of what they want, or provide the things that they are thought to need.

Pet Dogs Benefit Owners’ Health: A ‘Natural Experiment’ in China

This paper reports results from a ‘natural experiment’ taking place in China on the impact of dogs on owners’ health. Previous Western research has reported modest health benefits, but results have remained controversial. In China pets were banned in urban areas until 1992. Since then dog ownership has grown quite rapidly in the major cities, especially among younger women. In these quasi-experimental conditions, we hypothesise that dog ownership will show greater health benefits than in the West. Results are given from a survey of women aged 25–40 in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou (N = 3031). Half the respondents owned dogs and half did not. Owners reported better health-related outcomes. They exercised more frequently, slept better, had higher self-reported fitness and health, took fewer days off sick from work and were seen less by doctors. The concluding section indicates how these results may be integrated and suggests further research on the potential economic benefits of pets.

Identifying race and ethnicity in the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth

The 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth is among the few surveys to provide multiple reports on respondents’ race and ethnicity. Respondents were initially classified as Hispanic, black, or “other” on the basis of data collected during 1978 screener interviews. Respondents subsequently self-reported their “origin or descent” in 1979, and their race and Hispanic origin in 2002; the latter questions conform to the federal standards adopted in 1997 and used in the 2000 census. We use these data to (a) assess the size and nature of the multiracial population, (b) measure the degree of consistency among these alternative race-related variables, and (c) devise a number of alternative race/ethnicity taxonomies and determine which does the best job of explaining variation in log-wages. A key finding is that the explanatory power of race and ethnicity variables improves considerably when we cross-classify respondents by race and Hispanic origin. Little information is lost when multiracial respondents are assigned to one of their reported race categories because they make up only 1.3% of the sample.

Work-Family Conflict and Working Conditions in Western Europe

This article explores the influence of working conditions on work-family conflict (WFC) among married/cohabiting employees across seven European countries. Using data from the European Social Survey, the paper first investigates the role of working conditions relative to household level characteristics in mediating work-family conflict at the individual level. It then considers whether perceived conflict is lower in countries with coordinated production regimes and where social policy is more supportive of combining paid work and care demands. For men the lowest rates of WFC occurred in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, so for men there was a distinct ‘Nordic’ effect consistent with the welfare and production regime expectations. For women, we find paradoxically that ‘raw’ levels of work-family conflict are particularly high in France, Denmark and Sweden where supports for reconciling work and family life are high. Our models show that the high conflict among French women can be explained by household composition factors and so is due to higher levels of family pressures. Higher levels of conflict among Danish and Swedish women appear to be associated with their longer hours of work. Work conditions are found to play a larger role than family characteristics in accounting for work-family conflict, both in the country level models and in the pooled models. While this partly reflects our focus on the spillover of work into family life, it is notable that family characteristics have little effect in mediating work pressures. The results suggest that a policy emphasis on improving work conditions is likely to have major leverage in reducing work-family conflict.