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...

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, ...

Low Emission Zones Improve Air Quality and Health but Temporarily Decrease Life Satisfaction

Air pollution results in high economic costs arising from its negative impacts on human health, especially in urban areas. Driving restriction policies such as low emission zones (LEZs) are designed to improve air quality. Indeed, empirical analyses in this Weekly Report confirm that LEZs reduce traffic-related air pollution. However, the analyses also reveal unintended adverse effects on secondary ...

The Role of Different School Organizational Models in the Psychological Adaptation of Refugee Adolescents

Given the high number of refugee children and adolescents around the globe, it is critical to determine conditions that foster their adaptation in the receiving country. This study investigated the psychological adaptation of recently arrived adolescent refugees in Germany. We focused on whether psychological adaptation reflects the organizational approach taken by the school that refugee adolescents ...