Topic Well-being

Restrictions to Civil Liberties in a Pandemic and Satisfaction with Democracy

Unexpected crises, such as armed conflicts, natural disasters and pandemics require immediate government decisions on how to act to protect the population. The COVID-19 pandemic was the worst sudden onset global crisis since the Second World War, and highlighted tension between civil liberties and public health objectives. How did attitudes towards democracy respond to restrictive policy...

The Transition to Grandparenthood: No Consistent Evidence for Change in the Big Five Personality Traits and Life Satisfaction

Intergenerational relations have received close attention in the context of population aging and increased childcare provision by grandparents. However, few studies have investigated the psychological consequences of becoming a grandparent. In a preregistered test of grandparenthood as a developmental task in middle and older adulthood, we used representative panel data from the Netherlands (N = 563) ...

Chronic disease onset and wellbeing. Analyzing level, trend effects, and exploring the role of healthcare access

Objectives: Experiencing the onset of a chronic disease is a major life event impacting living conditions and wellbeing. Using longitudinal data, this study investigates immediate and trend impacts of chronic disease onset on life satisfaction and health satisfaction. It further examines, whether healthcare access buffers the immediate wellbeing reduction after disease onset.Methods: Data were...

Higher retirement age has negative health effects

An introduction to respondent-driven sampling (RDS) with case studies

Declining response rates have made traditional, probability-based sampling methods more resource-intensive and thus more expensive. Studies of population subgroups are particularly vulnerable to this trend, as smaller group sizes as well as other factors often make these groups "hard-to-reach" or "hard-to-survey". In response, researchers have increasingly relied on network...

Chimpanzee and human risk preferences show key similarities

Risk preference impacts how people make key life decisions related to health, wealth, and wellbeing. Yet the evolutionary roots of human risk taking behavior remain poorly understood. I will present two studies on risk preferences in chimpanzees, one of our closest living relatives.In the first study, we investigated whether chimpanzees (N=13) differentiate between social...

Belonging or Estrangement – the European Refugee Crisis and its Effects on Immigrant Identity

This study deals with the impact of the 2015 European Refugee Crisis on the ethnic identity of resident migrants in Germany. To derive plausibly causal estimates, I exploit the quasi-experimental setting in Germany, by which refugees are allocated to different counties by state authorities without being able to choose their locations themselves. This study finds that higher...

Location, Location, Location: The Role of Objective Neighborhood Characteristics for Perceptions of Control

Introduction: Control beliefs can protect against age-related declines in functioning. It is unclear whether neighborhood characteristics shape how much control people perceive over their life. This article studies associations of neighborhood characteristics with control beliefs of residents of a diverse metropolitan area (Berlin, Germany). Methods: We combine self-report data about perceptions of ...

Alternative Recipes for Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Five World Regions

In most cross-national research on Life Satisfaction (LS) an implicit assumption appears to be that the correlates of LS are the same the world over; ‘one size fits all’. Using data from the World Values Survey (1999–2014), we question this assumption by assessing the effects of differing personal values/life priorities on LS in five world regions: the West, Latin America, the Asian-Confucian region, ...

Teleworking and Life Satisfaction during COVID-19: The Importance of Family Structure

We carry out a difference-in-differences analysis of a representative real-time survey conducted as part of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study and show that teleworking had a negative average effect on life satisfaction over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This average effect hides considerable heterogeneity reflecting genderrole asymmetry: lower life satisfaction is only found ...