The pursuit of happiness

Abstract

Contemporary cross-cultural comparisons of life satisfaction show that survey research, by going to the people broadly and representatively, is a crucial complement to ethnography. Using the survey approach, the present article poses the following research question: is happiness driven more by economic or psychological factors? This question is investigated in the English and German populations with the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), and the European Social Survey (ESS). The results of the present study show that English and German life satisfaction follow different time trends and have different compositions. Both are driven more by psychological than economic factors, but Germans are more economically sensitive. The R2 = .59, achieved here for explaining English happiness, appears to be the highest yet recorded in the quality-of-life literature. This English R2 increases to .78 when a personality effect is included in the multiple-item predictor. Moreover, in the financial, housing and medical spheres of experience subjective representations of physical variables, rather than the physical scales themselves, are the operational determinants of life satisfaction. Finally, an important methodological result emerges in the present study; namely, ordinary regression of cardinal satisfaction scales can replace logistic regression in revealing the values of a nation.