Marital Satisfaction: A Positive Study

Throughasamplesurveyofsome6,000marriedmenandwomeninfourregionsinChina,thisstudy,withaviewtofindingouttheactualimpactofsexualdistinctionontheappraisalofmaritalrelations,makesamultivariateanalysisofthethreecompositefactors:thedegreeofsatisfactionwiththehusband-wiferelations,thecohesivenessofthetwoparties,andthedegreeofsatisfactionwiththeirsexlives.Inaddition,italsoattemptstoanalyzeothervariablessuchasthedemographiccharacteristicsoftheobjectofstudy,theindividualresources,thegenderroles,andinter-d…     

Morningness–Eveningness and Satisfaction with Life

Individual differences in diurnal preferences and circadian rhythms are viewed as an interesting dimension of human personality. Previous research has examined various psychological correlates of diurnal preference. Evening types reported psychological and psychosomatic disturbances more frequently and intensively than morning types and morning types have a healthier lifestyle than evening types. Depression was also related to eveningness as were bulimic behaviour and seasonal affected disorders (SAD). Given these studies, one would expect a positive relationship between satisfaction with life or happiness (general well-being; Diener et al. (J Pers Assess 49:71–75, 1985)) and morningness. There was a significant positive correlation between morningness and satisfaction with life (r = 0.177; p = 0.023; N = 164).     

How do Positive Views Maintain Life Satisfaction?

This study proposes three mediation pathways to explain how the positive views (perceived control, optimism and self-enhancement) proposed by Cummins and Nistico (Journal of Happiness Studies 3:37–69 2002) maintain life satisfaction. The three pathways were enhancing self-esteem, reducing have-want discrepancy and changing importance perceptions. Two hundred and seventy-two undergraduates from Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology and Nan Kai Institute of Technology voluntarily participated in this study. Questionnaires measuring sense of control, optimism, self-enhancement, self-esteem, have-want discrepancy and importance of life domains, and global life satisfaction were administered to participants in a classroom setting. Correlation and structural equation modeling analyses were conducted to examine the mediation effects of these three pathways. Generally, results of correlation and structural equation modeling analyses were consistent with hypothesized relations among variables and showed that the relationship between positive views and life satisfaction was completely mediated by self-esteem, have-want discrepancy and shifting tendency of importance perception, indicating that the three pathways of enhancing self-esteem, reducing have-want discrepancy and changing importance perceptions had unique effects to explain how positive views maintain life satisfaction.     

International Competition Intensified: Job Satisfaction Sacrificed?

Social Indicators Research - There has been an intense debate as to the effects of offshoring and global value chains on labor, with the debate centering around possible negative employment and...     

Life Domain Satisfaction: A Portugal–France Comparison

The study was aimed at replicating on a Portuguese sample the seven-factor model of life appraisal (physical autonomy, love life, family life, social life, occupational life, finances, and leisure life) that was suggested by Salvatore and Munoz Sastre Social Indicators Research 53:229–255 (2001). A sample of 1,111 Portuguese participants, aged 17–85, was presented with the Appraisal of Life Questionnaire. The “domain” model of life appraisal satisfactorily accounted for the data gathered on the Portuguese sample. Regarding finances and occupational life, Portuguese scores were lower than French scores. Regarding the occupational score and the leisure score, a clear linear decrease as a function of age was evidenced in the Portuguese sample. Finally, regarding the family score and the financial score, a non-linear relationship with age was found. An increase was observed from young adult age to adult age, and a decrease was observed from adult age to older age. A strong decrease in the physical autonomy scores among Portuguese females was also observed.     

Does Society Matter? Life Satisfaction in the Enlarged Europe

Life satisfaction is quite heterogeneously distributed across countries of the enlarged European Union. Previous research has shown how living conditions within individual countries, such as access to material and emotional resources, are important for personal well-being, but it has been less successful in explaining differences between countries. This article investigates whether it matters in which political and economic circumstances people live, as well as whether their particular perception of the quality of their societal environment plays a role. People are well aware that the institutional and cultural settings in which their lives are embedded create opportunities and limitations: within individual countries, perceptions of society influence life satisfaction outcomes irrespective of access to resources. However, their importance for well-being differs across Europe: perceptions of societies are highly decisive in countries that provide only a minimum of social security and in which the reliability of political institutions is poor. In rich and stable countries, the impact is weaker and private social support becomes more important. In addition to these country-specific weights of life satisfaction determinants, life satisfaction variations between countries can be explained to a large extent by taking into consideration the economic performance, the social security level, and the political culture in a country—all in all, general conditions that enable people to live a respectable life.     

Does Weather Really Influence the Measurement of Life Satisfaction?

Since the beginning of the nineties, a number of studies indicate that weather conditions at interview day can have an effect on measurement, in particular regarding life satisfaction. In their seminal paper, Schwarz and Clore (J Pers Soc Psychol 45(3):513–523, 1983) show higher reported life satisfaction for sunny days, a finding which is replicated recently by Kämpfer and Mutz (Soc Indic Res 110(2):579–595, 2013). However, both studies are based on relatively small samples (from a few dozen up to 200 cases). We use data of the German Family Panel (pairfam) and local weather data for every respondent to investigate if weather effects on satisfaction measurement can be replicated with a large sample (about 7,000 respondents). In addition to cross-sectional analyses in which we follow closely the approach of Kämpfer and Mutz, we estimate fixed effects regressions to model the effect of weather on individual changes in satisfaction over time. We do neither find an effect of nice weather on the day of the interview on the respondents’ ratings of general life satisfaction nor a consistent effect on any of the other satisfaction measures. These results show that at least with simple weather measures as they have been used as yet a relationship between weather conditions at interview day and answering behavior regarding life satisfaction cannot be found.     

Happiness and Satisfaction: Measures of Affect and Cognition?

Analyses of data from six national samples of adult respondents indicated that happiness could be predicted better from cognitive measures of domain satisfaction and work attitudes than from a measure of positive affect, thereby calling into question the widely accepted argument that satisfaction measures are cognitive and happiness measures affective in orientation. Perhaps distinctions between cognitive and affective measures are illusory in studies of subjective well being.     

Alegría! Flow in Leisure and Life Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Event Satisfaction Using Data from an Acrobatics Show

The aim of the current study was to examine the role of satisfaction-with-event as a mediator in the relations between flow and life satisfaction based on the bottom-up theory (Andrews and Withey in Social indicators of well-being: Americans’ perceptions of life quality. Plenum, New York, 1976; Lee et al. in J Macromarketing 22(2): 158–169, 2002). Four hundred and thirty-four participants with a mean age of 35.60 (SD = 11.76) were recruited from the audience of a “Cirque du Soleil” acrobatics show, performed in Taiwan in 2009. Participants completed the flow scale (Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row, New York, 1990), a satisfaction-with-event scale (Lin and Hsu in Mark Rev 3(4): 497–528, 2008), and a satisfaction-with-life scale (Diener et al. in J Pers Assess 49:71–75, 1985) immediately after viewing the show. Structural equation modeling was conducted to examine our hypothesis that satisfaction-with-event levels would fully mediate the relationship between flow and overall life satisfaction. Results supported our prediction and are discussed in terms of bottom-up theory. Implications of the study are also provided for the leisure managers.     

Life Satisfaction of Adolescents in Hunan,China: Reliability and Validity of Chinese Brief Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (BMSLSS)

The concept of poverty has gone beyond the monetary attributes to cover several dimensions directly influencing the level of individuals’ socio-economic status. Based on this methodological advancement, this study aims to approximate the deprivation of education, health and housing facilities to analyze the incidence of multidimensional poverty (MDP) at regional levels in the Sindh province of Pakistan. Findings revealed that the magnitude of MDP varies significantly across the regions due mainly to the variation in the deprivation levels of socio-economic aspects. Furthermore, the magnitude of MDP is higher in rural areas than urban areas in each region.     

Constraints,Satisfaction and Residential Mobility: Speare’s Model Reconsidered

Our study has shown that the stress threshold model, as formulated by Speare, only works partially. Consistent with Speare's model, we have found that subjective satisfaction is a strong predictor of thoughts about moving. Thoughts about moving is a good predictor of actual mobility. There are, however, three major problems with the model: stress as measured by satisfaction is not a particularly good predictor of actual mobility, although it does have some indirect influence through thoughts about moving; the "structural" variables have a strong independent impact on the mobility process beyond satisfaction; the satisfaction variables have little influence in mediating the effects of structural variables on mobility thoughts and behavior. The question of why our results differ from Speare's cannot be definitively answered here. We believe that our research has certain virtues in its direct measurement of satisfaction with home and community and also its much larger sample of movers. Speare's sample may have the virtue of being more representative of a large urban population since it was drawn from all segments of Rhode Island. Yet, while our sample is selective of areas within Seattle, we believe it provides a good representation of a wide variety of residential environments. Overall, our results are more consistent with the other studies which have addressed these issues (Bach and Smith, 1977; Lee, 1978; Michelson, 1977; Newman and Duncan, 1979), although the methods and approaches are not identical. Some of these studies were reviewed in the first part of the paper. We believe that understanding of the attitudinal predictors of changing residence is roughly at the same stage as research in the early post-World War II period on the attitudinal correlates of fertility behavior among American women. Research such as the Princeton study (Westoff et al., 1961; 1963) demonstrated that a variety of social attitudes about home, family, work and childbearing correlated poorly with levels of fertility. In contrast, such variables as objective religious affiliation, educational attainment, and race were clear correlates of fertility behavior. We still do not fully understand why these structural variables are important but we know that they are key predictors of behavior.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Can We Compare Life Satisfaction Between Nationalities? Evaluating Actual and Imagined Situations

Do differences in reported life satisfaction between societies reflect real differences or do they reflect cultural differences in the way people rate their experiences? Study 1 showed that imagining better or worse life situations affected student respondents’ ratings of their own life satisfaction, as predicted by range–frequency theory. Study 2 investigated how German and Polish students rated their actual life satisfaction and how satisfied they would be under three imagined scenarios. Study 3 similarly compared Danish and Hungarian students. Both studies found significant differences in the rating of the hypothetical situations, and moderate correlations between ratings of satisfaction in the hypothetical situations and reality, but in neither study were national differences in actual satisfaction predicted by differences in hypothetical satisfaction. Overall, the results suggest that national differences in rated life satisfaction are real rather than reflecting differences in how satisfaction is rated.     

Perceptions of “Impingement” and Marital Satisfaction Among Wives of Retired Husbands

ABSTRACT

Initial pilot interviews with women whose husbands were in the first year of retirement revealed that problems of “impingement”—perceptions of husbands as intruders into their worlds-as-lived—were cited, in response to open-ended items, as the most difficult aspect of husbands' retirement. An impingement index, consisting of items constructed from those responses, was administered to the original panel of 83 women whose husbands were now in the fourth year of retirement, and to a new panel of 61 women whose husbands had been retired for one year. Paired T-tests revealed one significant difference in perceptions of impingement between the two groups of wives, and not in the expected direction. Indeed, wives in year 4 were more often bothered by some impingement conditions than wives in year 1, and these were significantly related to self-assessments of marital satisfaction. Results have implications for “adjustment” to life transitions, including situations that may inhibit initiation of adaptive responses, degree of investment in social roles, and issues of expectation.     

A First Study of the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale with Adolescents

The psychometric properties of the MultidimensionalStudents Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS: Huebner, 1994) were assessed with a sample of adolescents fromgrades 9–12. Results of confirmatory factor analysessupported the hypothesized factor structure. Further,evidence for the convergent and discriminant validityof the instrument was obtained. Acceptable internalconsistency estimates for the Total and domain scoreswere also obtained. These psychometric propertieswere similar to findings of the MSLSS with youngerchildren. Limitations and future researchconsiderations were discussed.     

Better Government,Happier Residents? Quality of Government and Life Satisfaction in China

Social Indicators Research - How quality of government affects residents’ life satisfaction is a seldom discussed subject, especially in a non-democratic context. This research aims to...     

Perceived Corruption and Individuals’ Life Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Institutional Trust

Social Indicators Research - Corruption degrades the quality of institutions, increases economic inequality and limits growth. Recent studies indicate that corruption is also associated with lower...     

Minority Stress in Same-Sex Male Relationships: When Does It Impact Relationship Satisfaction?

The minority stress model (Meyer, 2003 Meyer, I. H. 2003. Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129: 674–697. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) has been proposed to explain higher rates of psychopathology in lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals. However, studies of minority stress have rarely taken into account the interface between minority stress and same-sex relationship processes. In the current study, 142 gay men in romantic relationships completed an online survey assessing minority stress constructs, relationship features, and relationship satisfaction. Minority stress was not directly related to relationship satisfaction, while commitment, trust, and support from one's partner were related to relationship satisfaction. Significant moderation effects emerged between discrimination and trust and between internalized heterosexism and commitment, indicating that trust was related to satisfaction for those who had experienced frequent discrimination, while commitment was related to satisfaction for those low in internalized heterosexism.     

Long Term Trends in Life Satisfaction, 1973–2012: Flanders in Europe

In this paper we focus on temporal heterogeneity of overall life satisfaction. Using repeated Eurobarometer Surveys from the period 1973–2012 and multilevel hierarchical age period cohort regression, trend, life-cycle and cohort effects are disentangled. In Flanders, the trend fluctuations are stronger than the life-cycle effects and there are hardly any generation effects. In other countries, by contrast, there are few or no trend fluctuations, but rather signs of a generational change. The international heterogeneity is particularly large and these international differences are stronger than the temporal ones. It remains unclear what factors from the macro-context lie at the basis of the observed international differences.     

Sample Heterogeneity and the Measurement Structure of the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale

Several measurement assumptions were examined with the goal of assessing the validity of the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS), a measure of adolescents’ satisfaction with their family, friends, living environment, school, self, and general quality of life. The data were obtained via a cross-sectional survey of 8,225 adolescents in British Columbia, Canada. Confirmatory factor and factor mixture analyses of ordinal data were used to examine the measurement assumptions. The adolescents did not respond to all the MSLSS items in a psychometrically equivalent manner. A correlated five-factor model for an abridged version of the MSLSS resulted in good fit when all negatively worded items and several positively worded items (the least invariant) were excluded. The abridged 18-item version of the MSLSS provides a promising alternative for the measurement of five life domains that are pertinent to adolescents’ quality of life.