Investigating the subjective well-being of United States regions.

Abstract

Subjective well-being (SWB) is a broad construct that is thought to reflect the quality of a person's life from his or her own perspective (Diener, Lucas, Schimmack, & Helliwell, 2009;Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). This construct can be assessed in a variety of ways, including through self-reports of affective experiences, through more explicit judgments about the conditions in a person's life (including judgments of life satisfaction), and even through non-self-report measures such as reports made by close informants (Schneider & Schimmack, 2009). The overarching goal of such assessment strategies is to determine whether the person finds life to be enjoyable, rewarding, and positive overall.Researchers assess well-being for a number of reasons. For instance, initial investigations into the construct were conducted with the goal of identifying basic human needs (Wilson, 1967). If certain characteristics are reliably correlated with well-being, then these characteristics might reflect

Are People Living in Walkable Areas Healthier and More Satisfied with Life?

“…Luttmer, 2005), and simply means that if two individuals' annual incomes were equal, the person living in a low median income (perhaps cheaper) area would be more satisfied with her life than the person living in a high median income (perhaps more expensive) area. Our supplementary analyses (see Supplementary Materials) using a group centering method also clarified this finding (see also Lucas, Cheung, & Lawless, 2014, for a relevant discussion). Specifically, after controlling for exactly the same individual-level variables, the group-centered analysis showed that when we compared the residents whose household income is about the median income in their respective area (e.g.…”

How happy are your neighbours? Variation in life satisfaction among 1200 Canadian neighbourhoods and communities

“…National surveys tend anyway to stratify at larger spatial scales, and very large samples must be accumulated in order to have both full coverage and the ability to statistically discriminate at fine spatial scales. Nonetheless, as sample sizes have increased, efforts to illustrate the spatial distribution and predictors of happiness within nations have been undertaken at increasingly fine geographic resolutions, including at the level of provinces in Europe [9, 16], US states [17–19] and subsequently counties [11, 12], and cities in the United States [10] Canada [13] and New Zealand [14], among others.…”

Life Satisfaction of U.S. Counties Predicts Population Growth

“…The between-person standard deviation was .63, and the between-county standard deviation was .04. For a descriptive overview of differences in life satisfaction across counties (including a map of these differences), see Lucas, Cheung, and Lawless (in press). The mean rate of growth across counties was 8%, with a standard deviation of 13 percentage points.…”