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Social Indicators Research

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01.04.2015

Are Happy Youth Also Satisfied Adults? An Analysis of the Impact of Childhood Factors on Adult Life Satisfaction

verfasst von: Sarah Jewell, Uma S. Kambhampati

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 2/2015

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Abstract

This paper aims to consider whether there is a link between youth happiness levels and adult life satisfaction. Our results are unequivocal that such a link exists both because demographic and socio-economic conditions are persistent over a lifetime and also because there is a persistence in personality effects. To test this link, we estimate a model of happiness for a sample of young people. This model provides us with a range of variables measuring socio-economic effects and personality effects amongst young people. These variables are then included in the adult life satisfaction model. The model is estimated using data from the British Household Panel Survey for 1994–2008. In addition to childhood happiness levels influencing adult life satisfaction significantly, we also find that the youthful personality trait for happiness has a larger effect on adult life satisfaction than demographic and socio-economic conditions.

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We exclude those who live with same sex parents or did not live with at least one parent e.g. lived with grandparents, other relatives or non-relatives, since some of our variables relate to the relationship with their parent(s), and it was not always obvious who their main guardian was. We also removed the few (189 cases) who had “other” parents (e.g. adopted, foster) as it was difficult to identify where to place these children (with biological parents or step parents).

Note that an exogenous variable in the Hausman–Taylor context is defined as a variable that is not correlated with the unobserved individual effect (α_i) while an endogenous variable is one that is. Neither is correlated with the idiosyncratic error term (ε_it).

see Land et al. (2001) for an index of Child and Youth Well-being based on a combination of these domains of life.

Including twins (only 120 cases of being a twin) and step siblings of the same age.

In some cases, it was evident that the answers did not necessarily relate to parents living within the household. Thus, young people answered the question even when they had earlier indicated that parents were not living in their household. The answer might therefore relate to their parents living in other households (after divorce or separation for example). We took the answers as given but made the interpretation conditional on the child stating having that parent.

Household income was adjusted for household size (weighting adults by 1 and children by 0.5).

This fixed effect is obtained in Stata through predict u, u after the regression specified in Eq. 2—which is fixed for each individual.

The predicted values without the individual effect is obtained in Stata through predict, xb; the predicted value with the individual fixed effect through predict xbu and the residual through predict, e.

In estimations not shown in this paper, we find that when the parent employment variables are excluded, being part of a single parent family reduces happiness for both sexes but the effect is smaller than that for being part of a step family. The fact that the parent employment variables affect the single parent variable could indicate that time spent with the child could mitigate any effects of only having one parent.

Other measures of income—monthly income and income quintiles—were also tested but all turned out to be insignificant.

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Titel: Are Happy Youth Also Satisfied Adults? An Analysis of the Impact of Childhood Factors on Adult Life Satisfaction
verfasst von: Sarah Jewell
Uma S. Kambhampati
Publikationsdatum: 01.04.2015
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 2/2015
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0642-6

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