The moderating influence of national goals for socializing children on an individual's satisfaction with life : the varying impact of health, wealth, happiness and control in 53 nations

We propose that satisfaction with one's life arises pan-culturally from the achievement of better health, greater financial satisfaction, stronger feelings of happiness and a sense of personal control over events. This four-factor model was tested for more than 70,000 persons across 53 nations using the representative samples provided by the World Values Survey, Wave 5. Using an HLM analysis, we show that the model components of health and control apply with equal strength to individuals regardless of their nationality. Feelings of happiness and judgments of one's wealth were, however, variable in their impact, being moderated by the two socialization goals extracted from the WVS, Self-directedness versus Other-directedness and Civility versus Practicality. In nations where Self-directedness is endorsed more strongly in socializing children, citizens' life satisfaction was more strongly driven by their feeling of happiness and less strongly by the judgment of their financial condition; in countries where Civility is endorsed more strongly, citizens' life satisfaction was more strongly driven by their feeling of happiness and less by the judgment of their financial condition. These results show that the socialization emphases characterizing one's national-cultural context operate to make some key components of life satisfaction more or less important. The general pan-cultural formula for achieving life satisfaction thus becomes specific to each national group.