Tanulmányok a szubjektív jóllét és a társas környezet kapcsolatáról: az összehasonlítás, a kultúra és a normák szerepe

Abstract

I analyse three aspects of the relationship between subjective well-being and the social environment. The first of them is the role of the reference groups. My re-sults based on Hungarian surveys from 1993 and 2005 show that beside absolute income interpersonal and intrapersonal comparison influence individuals’ satisfac-tion as well. The effect of reference group’s income depends on the characteristics of the reference group: when comparing ourselves with others of the same social status the signal effect is more dominant than the status effect, while when the social dis-tance grows the signal effect gets less significant. Contrary to my expectation effect of reference income did not change between the two time points, i.e. the size of the signal effect did not decrease. The most likely explanation of the result is that income of relevant others provided less information as social environment and future became less volatile and more predictable, but it was compensated by more positive evalua-tion of the future, and increasing confidence about “catching up with the Jonses”. In the next section I examine the effect of culture on life satisfaction using in-ternational migration as a natural experiment. I show that, ceteris paribus, in any giv-en residence country immigrants who come from countries with high levels of life satisfaction tend to be more satisfied than immigrants who migrate from countries with low levels of life satisfaction. Since immigrants differ only in their cultural backgrounds, the result can be interpreted as evidence for the causal effect of culture values, beliefs, attitudes and norms transmitted between generations) on individual subjective well-being. In the last section I analysed the relationship between intra-couple income distribution and subjective well-being. I show that the association between the wom-an’s relative income (the woman’s share of the couple’s total earnings) and life satis-faction is negative not only among men, but among women. The result can be ex-plained as the impact of traditional gender roles: among those who prefer equal gen-der roles the woman’s relative income has no effect on life satisfaction, whereas among those who prefer traditional gender roles the negative association is stronger.