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Alternative Recipes for Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Five World Regions

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Abstract

In most cross-national research on Life Satisfaction (LS) an implicit assumption appears to be that the correlates of LS are the same the world over; ‘one size fits all’. Using data from the World Values Survey (1999–2014), we question this assumption by assessing the effects of differing personal values/life priorities on LS in five world regions: the West, Latin America, the Asian-Confucian region, ex-Communist Eastern Europe, and the Communist countries of China and Vietnam. We indicate that differing values - traditional family values, friendship and leisure values, materialistic values, political values, prosocial and environmental values, and religious values – are endorsed to varying degrees in different parts of the world, and vary in whether they have positive or negative effects on LS. Personal values provide the basis for alternative ‘recipes’ affecting LS. By ‘recipes’ we mean linked set of values, attitudes, behavioural choices and domain satisfactions that have a positive or negative effect on LS. We estimate structural equation models which indicate that differing values-based recipes help to account for large, unexpected differences between mean levels of LS in the five world regions, compared with the levels ‘predicted’ by GDP per capita. In particular, the high priority given to traditional family and religious recipes in Latin America helps to account for unexpectedly high LS in that region. Deficits in prosocial attitudes and behaviours partly account for low LS in ex-Communist Eastern Europe.

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Notes

  1. By ‘prosocial’ values we mean values reflecting an intention to benefit other people and/or society as a whole.

  2. A third approach in the WVS involves asking about the qualities that are desirable in children. This is intended, in part, as a method of indirectly eliciting the values of adult respondents.

  3. Deaton (2008) notes that this was in part deliberate in order to facilitate comparisons with urban Westerners.

  4. Sample sizes in this section refer to numbers of respondents who provided valid LS ratings.

  5. This format is based on a version of Schwarz’s instrument referred to as the Portrait Values Questionnaire.

  6. Again, we reversed the scale so that a high score means ‘very much like me’.

  7. From a narrowly statistical standpoint, it might have been reasonable to include the Schwarz items measuring tradition (‘follow the traditions handed down by one’s religion or family’) and conformity (‘always behave properly’) in this index. They both correlate over 0.30 with ‘help the people nearby’. However, their inclusion would have had the effect of downgrading the mean rating of ‘family values’ in four of the five world regions to a lower level than at least one other set of values. In our view this would have been a distortion, since almost all studies of values ever conducted indicate that family values receive top rating. In this dataset ‘importance of family’ is rated higher than any other domain, and ‘help the people nearby’ is rated higher than any other Schwarz item.

  8. This is only a moderate correlation. However, it is also the case that the two items correlate to about the same degree with all other variables – measures of attitudes, behavioural choices and the domain satisfaction - in the family values recipe.

  9. Job satisfaction is not available for most countries in waves 4–6 of the WVS.

  10. International Monetary Fund (2018).

  11. The United Nations (2012–18) reports rising levels of LS in recent years in both Latin America and Eastern Europe. However, in the latest waves of both the Gallup World Survey and the World Values Survey, Latin America still recorded the highest mean LS out of the regions considered here, and Eastern Europe still recorded the lowest mean.

  12. This difference is not statistically significant at the 0.05 level.

  13. A plausible conjecture was that younger religious people in Eastern Europe would report higher LS, but this proved not to be the case.

  14. The mean ratings of values were similar in China and Vietnam, as were regression coefficients. So results for the two countries are combined in Tables 2 and 3.

  15. Controls are in place for gender, age, age-squared, partner status, educational attainment and household income.

  16. This last result means that there was no statistically significant difference, even at the 0.05 level, between the actual data covariance matrix and the matrix implied by the model in Figure 2.

  17. Total effects reported in relation to the ‘recipes’ are just slightly different from the R-squared estimates in Tables 3. The differences are due to the fact that only one set of values, and not all six, are included in the models of the ‘recipes’.

  18. This variable is not included in the family recipe model only because it is missing for too many cases.

  19. The Spearman rank order correlation of both attitudes with LS in the Asian-Confucian region is only 0.06.

  20. Latin America is the only region in which there is a moderate positive relationship between ‘living as one’s friends expect’ and LS; Spearman’s rho = 0.09 (p < 0.001).

  21. The WVS collects data on household income, but not specifically on labour earnings.

  22. In the equations underlying results in this paragraph the dependent variable is either LS or satisfaction with one’s financial situation, and the explanatory variables are the six values, plus socio-economic variables that are included as ‘controls’.

  23. In the equation underlying these results the dependent variable is the materialistic values index and the explanatory variables are gender, age, age-squared, educational level and household income.

  24. Figures showing the structural equation models are omitted; they would need to include too many variables for clear visual presentation.

  25. The only link that is stronger in the ex-Communist region is between endorsement of prosocial values and opposition to civic cheating.

  26. 6.96 in China, 8.41 in Vietnam.

  27. Latin America also records the highest mean rating on the civic cheating index (1.78 on the 0–10 scale). The ex-Communist region has the next highest rating at 1.42.

  28. Personality traits may also be significant determinants, but are not measured in the WVS. In Germany we found that low levels of ‘conscientiousness’ are related to giving low ratings to values (Headey and Wagner 2019).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin (MPIB) for financial support of this research during Headey’s visit to Berlin in summer 2018.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Melbourne Institute, Melbourne University, Melborurne, Australia

    Bruce Headey

  2. DIW Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Bruce Headey, Gisela Trommsdorff & Gert G. Wagner

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Constance, Germany

    Gisela Trommsdorff

  4. Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

    Gert G. Wagner

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  1. Bruce Headey
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Correspondence to Bruce Headey.

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Headey, B., Trommsdorff, G. & Wagner, G.G. Alternative Recipes for Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Five World Regions. Applied Research Quality Life 17, 763–794 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-021-09937-3

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