Cross-national and historical differences in subjective well-being

Anthony Francis Jorm · Siobhán Ryan

108 citations0/0 files storedInternational Journal of Epidemiology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction Health disparities and outcomes Quality of Life Measurement

Abstract

BACKGROUND: There is a growing body of population survey data on national subjective well-being which allows comparisons across countries and across periods. Key issues in this work are as follows. Can response to questions on well-being be meaningfully compared across countries and periods? What social conditions are associated with greater well-being both between countries and across periods? Are there lessons for how global well-being might be improved? This review aims to give an overview of this area and its relevance to psychiatric epidemiology. METHODS: Systematic searches of the literature were carried out using eight academic databases between August 2012 and January 2013. RESULTS: Subjective well-being involves multiple components, including cognitive evaluation of satisfaction with life and emotional state, and these are separable from mental ill health. Although there are difficulties in measuring subjective well-being in comparable ways cross-culturally, there is sufficient evidence of validity to make comparisons meaningful. The subjective well-being of nations increases with income per capita, but gains are smaller in higher-income countries. Other national factors that affect well-being include income inequality, social welfare, individualism, democracy and freedom, social capital and physical health. CONCLUSIONS: Economic growth of lower-income nations will improve global subjective well-being. However, this needs to be sustainable or it will reduce the well-being of future generations. Higher-income nations need to focus on other determinants of well-being. Research on cross-national well-being suggests a number of directions that may be profitably pursued in psychiatric epidemiology.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 108 citations exist upstream.

References

1977The CES-D Scale 2005Lifetime Prevalence and Age-of-Onset Distributions of DSM-IV Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication 1999Well-being : the foundations of hedonic psychology 1991Tripartite model of anxiety and depression: Psychometric evidence and taxonomic implications.2005Happiness: Lessons from a New Science 2002Personality, Culture, and Subjective Well-Being: Emotional and Cognitive Evaluations of Life 1999Well-Being Over Time in Britain and the USA 2004The social context of well–being

Cited by

2016Determinants of subjective well-being in representative samples of nations 2015Mental health problems are rising more in Swedish adolescents than in other Nordic countries and the Netherlands 2015A statistical meta-analysis of the wellbeing literature 2022Diminished Returns in Europe: Socioeconomic Status and Ethno-Racial Health Disparities Across 30 Countries in the European Social Survey 2022Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Theories of Wellbeing and Their Suitability for Wellbeing Policy

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.