QuestionLink construct report: Life satisfaction

Construct usage and definition

Asking respondents to give an overall life satisfaction estimate has a long tradition in the social sciences, beginning in what is now known as the social indicators movement in the 1960s and 1970s (Land & Michalos, 2018). The concept of life satisfaction is also linked to the broader context of measuring quality of life (Land & Michalos, 2018) and individual wellbeing or happiness (Kainulainen, 2018). The concept is a global measure of life satisfaction, in contrast to more focused life domain satisfaction measures (Fox & Kahnemann, 1992), such as satisfaction with work. Measures of life satisfaction are intended to capture a summative evaluation of respondents’ happiness and satisfaction with the current state of their life. However, forming such a broad evaluation is a complex task for respondents (Kahneman et al., 2010) and it is thus subject of debate what construct measures of life satisfaction capture. An influential idea is that life satisfaction can be decomposed into an affective, hedonic component and a cognitive component (Kahneman et al., 2002; Kainulainen, 2018). The affective component would encompass an evaluation of how well one feels and the cognitive component a contrast between the current state of one’s life and a subjective standard of how life should be (Kainulainen, 2018). To which degree direct questions about life satisfaction capture the affective or the cognitive component is up for debate. In the framework of Veenhoven, life satisfaction measures can be seen as a measure for the hedonic component of happiness in this framework (Kainulainen, 2018). Kahneman et al. (2010) meanwhile differentiate between life satisfaction measures and experienced happiness. Disentangling the many complexities surrounding the concept is beyond the scope of this brief overview. We just point out these issues to explain our instrument selection criteria.

Which instruments were chosen?

We chose single-item instruments asking respondents about how satisfied they currently are overall with their life. This means we chose instruments capturing a global satisfaction across different life domains. We also chose measures that capture current satisfaction, as opposed to prospective or retrospective instruments (e.g., how satisfied in ten years). Most notably, we only included the more common measures that directly ask about “satisfied” respondents are with their lives and not the few that ask about how “happy” respondents are. The discussion detailed earlier means that we cannot recommend merging satisfaction and happiness wordings into the same harmonized variable without further research.

Overview of data sources

This table lists and links the data sets or cumulations used for the current construct. For more detailed information including variable names to download the data yourself, see the next section.

Instrument data sources

The table below makes it easy to access data for a specific instrument, since it lists the survey, wave, year, and the respective variable name. Please note that some surveys only have one variable name across several years, whereas other surveys have different variable names per wave.

Please make use of the filter function, by clicking the filter input fields under each column name.

References

Fox, C. R., & Kahneman, D. (1992). Correlations, causes and heuristics in surveys of life satisfaction. Social Indicators Research, 27(3), 221–234. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00300462

Kahneman, D., Schkade, D. A., Fischler, C., Krueger, A. B., & Krilla, A. (2010). 2 The Structure of Well-Being in Two Cities: Life Satisfaction and Experienced Happiness in Columbus, Ohio; and Rennes, France. In E. Diener, D. Kahneman, & J. Helliwell, International Differences in Well-Being (1st ed., pp. 16–33). Oxford University PressNew York. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732739.003.0002

Kainulainen, S., Saari, J., & Veenhoven, R. (2018). Life-satisfaction is more a matter of feeling well than having what you want. Tests of Veenhoven’s theory. International Journal of Happiness and Development, 4(3), 209. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJHD.2018.093728

Land, K. C., & Michalos, A. C. (2018). Fifty Years After the Social Indicators Movement: Has the Promise Been Fulfilled?: An Assessment an Agenda for the Future. Social Indicators Research, 135(3), 835–868. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1571-y