1 Introduction
Leading a happy and fulfilling life has become an important goal for individuals in postmodern societies (Burnett,
2012), and issues of quality of life have risen up the political agenda (Bache,
2013). It is therefore no surprise that subjective well-being (SWB) has been an important issue for social scientists since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic that kept the world in suspense for fully three years (by the end of 2022, it seemed to have entered an endemic stage). With millions of deaths worldwide and many more millions infected, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) posed a dramatic threat to individual and public health, with repercussion for social and economic life: The tough measures national governments undertook to contain the virus, such as social distancing rules and lockdowns, caused social and public life to freeze temporarily and economies to shrink (Destatis,
2022; Hale et al.,
2021).
Under the new pandemic conditions, SWB research focused primarily on mental distress, with the majority of studies—unsurprisingly—showing an increase in stress symptoms and psychological problems across the globe (Banks et al.,
2021; cf. also the meta reviews by Aknin et al.,
2022; Robinson et al.,
2022). Negative emotions increased significantly in many countries, according to the
World Happiness Report 2021 (Helliwell et al.,
2021)—including, apparently, in the two countries that are the focus of the study at hand: Germany (Zacher & Rudolph,
2021) and the United Kingdom (Bonomi Bezzo et al.,
2021). In contrast, the pandemic’s impact on evaluative well-being—life satisfaction—was much less clear-cut. Comparing cross-sectional survey data before and after the outbreak of the pandemic, the
World Happiness Report 2021 listed 20 countries (including the United Kingdom) with worsening, 49 with steady, but also 26 countries (including Germany) with improving average life satisfaction (Helliwell et al.,
2021). The
World Happiness Report 2022 (Helliwell et al.,
2022) confirmed these results and did not find a clear downward trend of overall life satisfaction.
Yet, stability at the aggregate level neither precludes volatility at the individual level, nor widening or shrinking of well-being inequalities. In many countries there have been intense debates about various subpopulations being hit especially hard by the lockdown of shops, offices, and schools, such as women (Bertogg et al.,
2021; Zoch et al.,
2021), parents (Huebener et al.,
2021), singles (Tutzer et al.,
2021), younger people (Entringer et al.,
2020), and workers (Schmidtke et al.,
2021). Despite governmental aid packages, poverty rates in Europe increased in the first year of the pandemic (Menta,
2021), and so did the economic strain of low-income households (Gambacorta et al.,
2021). In short, the main concern was that the pandemic increased existing inequalities, rather than being the “democratic leveler”, as Beck (
1992) described the new dangers of late modern risk society.
Against this background, this paper is specifically interested in life satisfaction inequality under the pandemic conditions, and the role of three broad types of capital in the formation of individual-level differences in satisfaction: human and economic capital, social capital, and psychological capital. Because these resources are widely seen as protective forces for well-being, the progressing pandemic could have widened gaps in life satisfaction. To verify this assumption, we utilize two rounds of binational panel data for Germany and the United Kingdom from the “Values in Crisis” project (henceforth: “VIC-project”) collected in spring 2020 and 2021. These data allow us to track the development of life satisfaction within individuals and its association with capital endowments as the pandemic progressed—and worsened—in Europe. From today’s perspective, Germany and the United Kingdom certainly qualify as quite similar cases in how the pandemic has been managed overall. Yet, in early 2020, the United Kingdom pursued a less stringent approach to combat the pandemic (Hale et al.,
2021; Steinhardt,
2021), and throughout the first year of the pandemic both infections and casualties were markedly higher in the United Kingdom than in Germany (Ritchie et al.,
2020). The findings of our study will be important for judging the consequences for well-being of the pandemic from a social inequality perspective.
5 Discussion
Employing data for Germany and the United Kingdom from the Values in Crisis (VIC) project (2020/2021), we had two research goals concerning people’s well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic: first, to investigate the scale of life satisfaction inequality cross-sectionally (2020 and 2021), including its structuration by different types of capital; and second, to identify longitudinally whether endowments with human and economic, social, and psychological capital in the early stage of the pandemic promoted or inhibited life satisfaction changes within individuals as the pandemic progressed (from 2020 to 2021).
As regards the first research goal, the dispersion of life satisfaction increased slightly within the German and UK populations according to most of the inequality measures utilized. Given the tiny increase, however, it would be an exaggeration to say that the pandemic really deepened inequality in evaluative well-being, but the pandemic can certainly not be deemed a leveler either. In terms of the structuration of life satisfaction during the pandemic, the key finding of this study is that as the pandemic progressed and worsened, life satisfaction did not become more tightly associated with—and in this sense structured by—the various forms of capital. Yet, a better resource endowment is associated with higher life satisfaction, with psychological capital being most important in both of the years covered.
With respect to the second research goal, we found that about one third of individuals reported increases, stability, or decreases in life satisfaction from spring 2020 to 2021, with individuals from the United Kingdom reporting decreases slightly more often than those from Germany. While this—almost—even distribution of trajectories indicates differential success of individuals in their attempt to weather the pandemic, their initial endowment with human, economic, and social capital hardly played a role. Only psychological capital mattered in this longitudinal perspective, the load of mental problems in particular. Seen in conjunction with research that documented a rise in psychological distress, worldwide (cf. Wang et al.,
2020) and in both countries examined in this paper (for Germany, Schmidtke et al.,
2021; for the United Kingdom, Banks & Xu,
2020), this finding is more than plausible.
Although some of our findings are backed by previous research (see, for example, the cross-sectional analyses by Helliwell et al.,
2020,
2021), they are nevertheless puzzling as they do not support the widespread narrative of the pandemic as an amplifier of social inequalities—which had also guided our hypotheses. Eurofound, an EU agency, saw a “gulf that opened up between those for whom the lockdown measures had little material impact and those who saw their economic bedrock crumble” (Eurofound,
2021, p. 58). At least for evaluative well-being, we found few indications of such a gulf. Likewise, according to previous research, various sociodemographic groups were particularly disadvantaged by the pandemic and its management, for very different reasons in each case: young adults (Entringer et al.,
2020; McKinlay et al.,
2022), students (Salmela-Aro et al.,
2022), workers in short-time work schemes (Schmidtke et al.,
2021), and women (Bertogg et al.,
2021; Zoch et al.,
2021). Yet we hardly see these disadvantages in the life satisfaction dispersion and gaps we analyzed. One possibility is that we mainly focused on capital endowments, rather than on specific sociodemographic groups. The sociodemographic characteristics we included in our models as controls, though, gave no indication of growing satisfaction gaps along these lines. The more likely explanation, therefore, is that these pandemic-induced disadvantages do not fully filter through to life satisfaction.
In view of their prominent role in the stress process model, another puzzling finding is that the endowment with human, economic, and social capital was not systematically linked to within-person life satisfaction development—especially when considering that the pandemic
worsened during our study period. Only psychological capital mattered. The very nature of the pandemic as a collective, rather than individual, crisis may provide an explanation for the difference: The threat of COVID-19 to existential security was nationwide and largely blind to socioeconomic differences—similarly to the “democratic” modernization risks Ulrich Beck has discussed in his
risk society (Beck,
1992). Even though the pandemic caused economic problems (Eurofound,
2021; Gambacorta et al.,
2021; Menta,
2021), and social distancing increased feelings of loneliness (Okabe-Miyamoto & Lyubomirsky,
2021), the main challenge was of a
psychological nature: coping with the distress resulting from perceived threat and perceived uncertainty (cf. Freeston et al.,
2020). Dealing with this distress successfully seems to have been a matter of psychological resilience rather than of socioeconomic resources. Not all manifestations of psychological capital were equally beneficial, though: For example, being an empathetic person seems not to be an asset in a public health crisis. What needs explanation, however, is why social capital, and especially family-related social capital, which typically comes with emotional support, was not
more beneficial during the pandemic. One explanation is that under pandemic conditions, the strong ties primary social networks provide can also have specific downsides (cf. Hudde et al.,
2023): concerns about the physical and psychological health of partners and children, as well as a disruption of the work-life balance through homeschooling and the temporary closing of kindergartens.
This interpretation should not be misunderstood as a plea that well-being research should care less about socioeconomic resources, quite the contrary: Our cross-sectional results corroborate that
all forms of capital—human, economic, social, and psychological capital—are systematically associated with higher evaluative well-being. These findings dovetail with seminal quality-of-life theories that converge in the idea that the resources individuals can utilize enable them to consciously direct their lives (Erikson,
1993; Sen,
1993). It is not surprising that psychological capital is the strongest predictor, as it is conceptually closer to overall well-being than the other types of capital.
It goes without saying that the study at hand is not without limitations. First, our data do not allow us to properly measure physical health, as much as we would have liked to have taken this variable into account. Future research should aim to incorporate a broader range of what Veenhoven (
2012) calls “life abilities,” such as physical health and intellectual skill. Second, like most survey projects that were initiated as a
response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we do not have a pre-pandemic benchmark that would allow us to trace the impact of the outbreak on life satisfaction. Third, we only explored evaluative well-being. Examining other subjective well-being measures, e.g., domain satisfaction or emotional well-being, would be helpful in assessing subjective well-being inequality under the pandemic conditions more comprehensively. It is likely that different well-being components have different sensitivities regarding crisis-induced inequalities. Finally, evidence from other countries, ideally from other world regions, is needed to get a sense of how specific the results of this study are to affluent European countries.
Layard (
2005) has repeatedly argued that mental problems are “probably the largest single cause of misery in Western societies” (p. 181), and this study supports this statement. Given our key findings, two policy implications are self-evident: In times of acute and deep crisis (such as the COVID-19 pandemic), minimizing the crisis-induced psychological burden should take priority. Low-threshold mental healthcare services, such as easily understandable and accessible information, mental health hotlines, or low-price consultation options, are important to prevent rising psychological distress, and thus to enable more people to maintain or regain a decent life satisfaction. In times of normalcy, public policy should invest in citizens’ psychological capital in order to make societies more resilient—just in case the next big crisis is just around the corner.
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.