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Social Indicators Research

Erschienen in:

01.07.2014

Social Comparisons and Life Satisfaction Across Racial and Ethnic Groups: The Effects of Status, Information and Solidarity

verfasst von: Lewis Davis, Stephen Wu

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 3/2014

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Abstract

This paper explores the role of within group social comparisons on the life satisfaction of different racial and ethnic groups in the US. For Whites, we find that higher group income levels are associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, a result that is consistent with a preference for within group status. In contrast, life satisfaction is increasing in group income for Blacks. This result is consistent with the existence of social norms that emphasize Black solidarity. It is also consistent with an information effect in which Blacks rely on peer income levels to form expectations regarding their future prospects. We introduce a theoretical framework to help to distinguish between solidarity and information effects. Our empirical results provide strong support for the hypothesis that solidarity rather than information accounts for the positive relationship between average Black income and the subjective wellbeing of US Blacks. Finally, we consider two theories of social solidarity and find support for social salience but not social density in determining the strength of solidarity effects.

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There are also claims that racial solidarity has decreased over the last few decades as opportunities for advancement for some minorities have left others behind, e.g. Wilson (1987).

Hirschman and Rothschild (1973) introduced this information effect, which they call the “tunnel effect,” based on the analogy of traffic congestion in the middle of a two-lane tunnel. Although my own lane has not started moving, if the other one begins to move, then I have an expectation that traffic has dissipated and it will soon be my turn to move. See Davis (2012) for a formal model of tunnel effects.

Senik (2008) finds evidence of information effects in the US data, though she does not consider whether they differ in strength by race or ethnicity. We posit that a key reason for the difference in our findings derives for the nature of the comparison income measure we use. Senik (2008) uses an income measure based on an individual’s professional peers, while we use a measure based on an individual’s social peers.

Kingdon and Knight’s (2007) find evidence of solidarity at the level of individual clusters, which correspond to villages or urban neighborhoods (average population 2,100). Since clusters tend to be highly racially homogeneous, this finding is consistent with racial solidarity. However, at the district level (average population of 125,400), these authors find a negative relationship between happiness and average race-specific income.

As a practical matter, our data includes information on an individual’s self reported membership in one of four groups, three which are racial (White, Black and Asian), and one ethnic category (Hispanic). Thus, our discussion does not distinguish between racial and ethnic groups.

An alternative formulation of (1) would emphasize a preference for intergroup status rather than group solidarity. In this case, individual utility would be increasing in the relative level of group income, \( y_{G} /\bar{y}, \) rather than the absolute level of group income. As we are not able to distinguish between these utility functions empirically, we do not elaborate further on the potential for intergroup status effects.

See Easterlin (2001) on the role of lifetime income in self reported happiness.

We pool the data across years, but we obtain similar results for separate regressions by year of survey.

An alternative method would be to use a linear multilevel model individuals, groups and states as three possible levels (e.g. Pittau et al. 2010). In our context, however, with only four racial and ethnic groups under consideration, the gains to multilevel modeling are relatively small.

Senik (2008) constructs her measure of reference income by regressing income on personal and regional characteristics, including industry and occupation dummy variables. The inclusion of industry and occupational information increases the salience of this measure for predicting future income levels and reduces its salience for social comparisons, since it ignores any status conferred by income differences that arise from differences in industry and occupation. Similarly, Clark et al. (2009) considers how subjective well-being differs with the average income of coworkers, which may explain why the information channel dominates social comparison in their results.

Another possibility is that intergroup differences in the coefficients on average group income are a statistical artifact that reflect differences in the composition of the group samples. In particular, the Black sample is over 70 % female, whereas the gender ratio is much more balanced for the other groups. If women are experiencing more group altruism or weaker group status effects, then the apparent difference in intergroup status and solidarity effects may actually reflect differences in the gender composition of the group samples. We test this hypothesis with the specification in Eq. (5) using an individual’s gender to construct the interaction term. The gender interaction terms are insignificant for both Whites and Blacks, suggesting no significant difference in status and solidarity effects across genders. These regressions do not support the hypothesis that the gender composition of the group samples plays a significant role in driving intergroup differences in social comparisons.

Our results for the education interaction term are in line with Dawson (1994), who finds that Black solidarity increases with education, but not with Gurin et al. (1989) and Hoston (2009), who come to the opposite conclusion.

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Titel: Social Comparisons and Life Satisfaction Across Racial and Ethnic Groups: The Effects of Status, Information and Solidarity
verfasst von: Lewis Davis
Stephen Wu
Publikationsdatum: 01.07.2014
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 3/2014
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-013-0367-y

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