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Social Indicators Research

Erschienen in:

01.12.2012

Subjective Well-Being: Keeping Up with the Perception of the Joneses

verfasst von: Cahit Guven, Bent E. Sørensen

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 3/2012

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Abstract

Using data from the US General Social Survey 1972–2004, we study the role of perceptions and status in self-reported happiness. Reference group income negatively relates to own happiness and high perceptions about own relative income, quality of dwelling, and social class relate positively and very significantly to happiness. Perceptions about income and status matter more for females, and for low income, conservative, more social, and less trusting individuals. Dwelling perceptions matter more for males, and for middle income, married, conservative, more social, and less trusting individuals.

Vorheriger Artikel An Exploratory Study of Trust and Material Hardship in Ghana

Nächster Artikel Income Inequality Indices Interpreted as Measures of Relative Deprivation/Satisfaction

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The GSS is in transition from a replication cross-sectional design to a design that uses rotating panels. In 2008 there were two components: a new 2008 cross-section with 2,023 cases and the first re-interviews with 1,536 respondents from the 2006 GSS, however these data are not available yet but will be available in the future.

We tried different reference groups such as people living in the same region. To save space, we do not report these results. See Senik (2009) and Rablen (2008) for more discussion on income comparisons and the choice of reference groups.

GSS also created its own household income variable which is available in the dataset and we checked our results with this variable as well.

Frijters and Ferrer-i-Carbonell (2003) show that for self-reported happiness, OLS and ordered probit estimates give quite similar results.

People tend to choose the item in the middle in the categorical questions and this may bias our results, therefore we also consider using happiness available as 4 and 7 categories (which are available only by a small fraction of the sample) in the robustness section.

We use real income in all our regressions—Winkelmann et al. (2007b) show that there is no money illusion with respect to individual satisfaction.

Winkelmann et al. (2007a) show that well-being from working in ones chosen job may be higher rather than from in any random job.

We still include occupational prestige in column 3 and in all regressions where perceived social class enters as a correlate of happiness in the rest of the paper. However, we do not report the coefficients since they are not significant as one may expect from the results in the second column of Table 6.

We also tried interactions with being self-employed (versus being an employee). We did not find any significant results when we used our perception variables as continuous variables. However, when we used perceptions as categorical variables, we found significant interaction effects only for perceived relative income.

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Titel: Subjective Well-Being: Keeping Up with the Perception of the Joneses
verfasst von: Cahit Guven
Bent E. Sørensen
Publikationsdatum: 01.12.2012
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 3/2012
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9910-x

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