Abstract
How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when well-being is being measured according to the way people in country A think about well-being? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and interdependent happiness focusing on individual and family, collected mostly from students, across forty-nine countries. We demonstrate that the relative idealization of the two types of well-being varies across cultural contexts and are associated with culturally different models of selfhood. Furthermore, we show that rankings of societal well-being based on life satisfaction tend to underestimate the contribution from interdependent happiness. We introduce a new culturally sensitive method for calculating societal well-being, and examine its construct validity by testing for associations with the experience of emotions and with individualism-collectivism. This new culturally sensitive approach represents a slight, yet important improvement in measuring well-being.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 607-627 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Journal of Happiness Studies |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 26 Dec 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Feb 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022, The Author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by the Norway Grants 2014–2021 operated by the National Science Centre (Poland) under Project Contract No 2019/34/H/ HS6/00597 (GRIEG); National Science Centre (Poland) grant UMO-2016/23/D/HS6/02946; the Hungarian OTKA-K 135963, the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development – CNPq under Grant 301298/2018-1; the Czech Science Foundation CSF under Grant 20-08583S, by the NPO, Systemic Risk Institute, LX22NPO510, EU - Next Generation EU; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 71873133; and the Department of Educational Studies, University of Roma Tre under biannual Grant DSF 2017–2018.
Keywords
- Culture
- Happiness
- Well-being
- Interdependent happiness
- life satisfaction
- Cultural sensitivity
- Selfhoods
- Self-construals