Abstract
Virtually everybody would agree that life satisfaction is of immense importance in everyday life. Thus, it is not surprising that a considerable amount of research using many different methodological approaches has investigated what the best predictors of life satisfaction are. In the present study, we have focused on several key potential influences on life satisfaction including bottom-up and top-down models, cross-cultural effects, and demographic variables. In four independent (large scale) surveys with sample sizes ranging from N = 488 to 40,297, we examined the associations between life satisfaction and various related variables. Our findings demonstrate that prediction of overall life satisfaction works best when including information about specific life satisfaction variables. From this perspective, satisfaction with leisure showed the highest impact on overall life satisfaction in our European samples. Personality was also robustly associated with life satisfaction, but only when life satisfaction variables were not included in the regression model. These findings could be replicated in all four independent samples, but it was also demonstrated that the relevance of life satisfaction variables changed under the influence of cross-cultural effects.
Highlights
During the last few decades, life satisfaction has been investigated by an impressive number of studies around the world
When personality variables and life satisfaction variables were entered in a hierarchical regression model in separate blocks, the explained variance (R2 ) of all personality variables did increase to a maximum of R2 = 0.098, but this was still much lower than the highest R2 (0.533) of all life satisfaction variables
Taking the data from the present study into account combined with findings in the literature, we propose a life satisfaction model in which overall life satisfaction levels are determined by both top-down and bottom-up effects
Summary
During the last few decades, life satisfaction has been investigated by an impressive number of studies around the world. Several studies have investigated cross-cultural differences in the context of life satisfaction [23,24,25] along with the influence of demographic variables such as age and gender [26,27]. These latter studies have provided some (preliminary) evidence that cross-cultural differences as well as age and gender could have an influence on life satisfaction, but more research is needed to establish clear patterns This brief overview of studies concerning life satisfaction highlights both the worldwide interest in this research topic as well as the need for further research to determine the key influential factors
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