Abstract
The literature is rife with papers discussing the state of developed and developing economies with a number of commonalities around what drives life satisfaction. In sum, females, the educated and well off, younger and older generations, the married or partnered as well as employees with decent job prospects report higher life satisfaction. Yet, whether these hold true in a diverse, expatriate society transitioning from post-oil dependence to a knowledge economy, as is the case in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is unknown. Using survey data of a nationally representative sample collected by the Gallup Organization between the years of 2006 to 2017, we explore life satisfaction of more than 17,000 UAE residents and citizens. Our results show that the usual predictors found in other nations did not completely hold true. Age does not follow the usual U-shaped life satisfaction relationship in male or female citizens. Tertiary education contributes to life satisfaction only for men, but not women. Unemployment and the freedom to live one’s life as chosen have no significant impact. There remain culture-specific determinants of life satisfaction that require continued investigation, particularly in Middle Eastern nations such as the UAE.
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Notes
Information on the GWP is available from https://www.gallup.com/analytics/232838/world-poll.aspx
We used the pooled data to have more reliability of the tests for the relationships between certain socio-demographic groups as taking the sample for one of the years for regression would not allow for groups analysis (like income groups or employment status etc).
We add year dummies to the models to control for the time changes (with 2017 as basic category). The year dummies proved mostly insignificant, that is why focus more on other predictors.
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The work of Mohsen Joshanloo was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A3A2066611).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Louise Lambert, Tatiana Karabchuk, and Mohsen Joshanloo. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Louise Lambert and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Lambert, L., Karabchuk, T. & Joshanloo, M. Predictors of life satisfaction in the United Arab Emirates: Results based on Gallup data. Curr Psychol 41, 3827–3841 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00873-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00873-3