Gallup Data Research Articles

Semi-Supervised Machine Learning Method for Predicting Observed Individual Risk Preference Using Gallup Data

Risk and uncertainty play a vital role in almost every significant economic decision, and an individual’s propensity to make riskier decisions also depends on various circumstances. This article aims to investigate the effects of social and economic covariates on an individual’s willingness to take general risks and extends the scope of existing works by using quantitative measures of risk-taking from the GPS and Gallup datasets (in addition to the qualitative measures used in the literature). Based on the available observed risk-taking data for one year, this article proposes a semi-supervised machine learning-based approach that can efficiently predict the observed risk index for those countries/individuals for years when the observed risk-taking index was not collected. We find that linear models are insufficient to capture certain patterns among risk-taking factors, and non-linear models, such as random forest regression, can obtain better root mean squared values than those reported in past literature. In addition to finding factors that agree with past studies, we also find that subjective well-being influences risk-taking behavior.

Hurt on Both Sides: Political Differences in Health and Well-Being during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Republicans and conservatives report better self-rated health and well-being compared to Democrats and liberals, yet they are more likely to reside in geographic areas with heavy COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. This harmed health on "both sides" of political divides, occurring in a time of rapid sociopolitical upheaval, warrants the revisiting of psychosocial mechanisms linked to political health differences. Drawing on national Gallup data (early 2021), we find that predicted differences in health or well-being vary substantially by ideology, party, voting behavior, and policy beliefs, with model fit depending on how politics are measured. Differences in self-rated health, psychological distress, happiness, trouble sleeping, and delayed health care tend to reveal worse outcomes for Democrats or liberals. Such differences often are reduced to insignificance by some combination of mastery, meritocratic beliefs, perceived social support, and COVID-19-related exposures and attitudes. Policy beliefs predict health differences most robustly across outcomes and mechanism adjustments.

Out of time, out of mind: Multifaceted time perceptions and mental wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Individuals commonly report feeling rushed in industrial societies such as the United States. However, social and economic upheavals such as disasters, recessions, and pandemics complicate perceptions of time by disrupting routines and creating experiences of trauma. In existing research, time perceptions usually are studied separately, leaving unclear how individuals in the United States might experience time in multifaceted ways while working, caring, and grieving. Moreover, previous research has not established whether multifaceted time perceptions each carry independent influences on mental wellbeing, or how they are shaped by sociodemographic background or pandemic-related stressors. Drawing on national Gallup data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic (Spring 2021), we find that Americans generally report some degree of feeling rushed, and also perceive multiple types of time disorientation involving slowness, quickness, and days and weeks blending together. Perceptions that time is moving too quickly or too slowly show an inverse relationship, as expected. Feeling rushed and that days or weeks are blending together also show relationships with both of these perceptions over a 3-month recall period. Importantly, we find that each of these time perceptions is shaped uniquely by income, work hours, age, or having children at home, and that each matters for understanding levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms and overall sense of mastery or control in life. Pandemic-related stressors, including economic strain, working from home, homeschooling a child, and severe household conflict, also show considerable relationships with these multifaceted time perceptions.

The Anna Karenina income effect: Well-being inequality decreases with income

Prior research finds that income is positively related to well-being. While this finding is important, we argue that it hides systematic variability within income groups and, importantly, the relative prevalence of extreme unhappiness (misery) and extreme happiness (bliss) across income groups. Using Gallup data from over two million US survey respondents, we find that well-being inequality decreases markedly with income, where rich people are more similar in their well-being than poor people. We further find that both the level-enhancing effect and the variance-reducing effect of income are primarily the result of a declining misery along the income distribution, whereas the share of bliss remains relatively constant. These results are explained by a combination of heterogeneous health and unemployment effects along the income distribution, and some social status concerns.

Filling in the white space: Spatial interpolation with Gaussian processes and social media data

Full national coverage below the state level is difficult to attain through survey-based data collection. Even the largest survey-based data collections, such as the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System or the Gallup-Healthways Well-being Index (both with more than 300,000 responses p.a.) only allow for the estimation of annual averages for about 260 out of roughly U.S. 3,000 counties when a threshold of 300 responses per county is used. Using a relatively high threshold of 300 responses gives substantially higher convergent validity–higher correlations with health variables–than lower thresholds but covers a reduced and biased sample of the population. We present principled methods to interpolate spatial estimates and show that including large-scale geotagged social media data can increase interpolation accuracy. In this work, we focus on Gallup-reported life satisfaction, a widely-used measure of subjective well-being. We use Gaussian Processes (GP), a formal Bayesian model, to interpolate life satisfaction, which we optimally combine with estimates from low-count data. We interpolate over several spaces (geographic and socioeconomic) and extend these evaluations to the space created by variables encoding language frequencies of approximately 6 million geotagged Twitter users. We find that Twitter language use can serve as a rough aggregate measure of socioeconomic and cultural similarity, and improves upon estimates derived from a wide variety of socioeconomic, demographic, and geographic similarity measures. We show that applying Gaussian Processes to the limited Gallup data allows us to generate estimates for a much larger number of counties while maintaining the same level of convergent validity with external criteria (i.e., N = 1,133 vs. 2,954 counties). This work suggests that spatial coverage of psychological variables can be reliably extended through Bayesian techniques while maintaining out-of-sample prediction accuracy and that Twitter language adds important information about cultural similarity over and above traditional socio-demographic and geographic similarity measures. Finally, to facilitate the adoption of these methods, we have also open-sourced an online tool that researchers can freely use to interpolate their data across geographies.

The Relevance of Religion for Political Office: Voter Bias Toward Candidates from Different Religious Backgrounds

Over the last several decades, Gallup data shows an increased willingness among members of the public to support presidential candidates from a wide range of religious backgrounds, though a nontrivial proportion of the public is still unwilling to vote for an Atheist, Mormon, or Muslim. What underlies this opposition? We argue that voters evaluate candidates from religious out-groups more negatively on a wide range of dimensions considered desirable for political office, and that this bias should be more pronounced among the highly religious. We show support for these arguments using a survey experiment fielded with YouGov. Atheists and Muslim candidates were perceived more negatively on a large set of traits considered desirable for political office compared to candidates from religious in-groups, and Mormon candidates fall somewhere in between. The Atheist and Muslim candidates were also perceived as less competent on a diverse set of issues.

Socioeconomic Status as a Risk Factor in Economic and Physical Harm from COVID-19: Evidence from the United States

We provide an empirical summary of the relationship between socioeconomic status and the economic and disease burden of the SARS-CoV2 pandemic in the United States. We rely on large-scale public data, including a zip code database we constructed from public records, to investigate the relationship between socioeconomic status and the risk of economic harm, COVID-19 infection, or COVID-19-related death. We find that low levels of education and income are associated with 1.3 to 2 times higher risk of economic harm and 2 to 3 times greater physical harm. Education and income have a similar effect size to racial and ethnic disparities, with many Americans of color facing worse outcomes. Using Gallup data to investigate potential mechanisms, we find that socioeconomic status is not related to preventative behavior like mask use but is related to occupation-related exposure, which puts lower-socioeconomic-status households at risk.

Employee Engagement as a Function of Perceived Organizational Support and Organizational Justice

In today's world, finding dedicated employees is difficult. It is important to identify the root factors that lead to employees being engaged. Employee Engagement is influenced by perceptions of organizational support and organizational justice. Employee engagement and retention are high priorities for HR executives. Disengaged workers are a major contributor to high turnover of employees, and heavily active businesses reduce both sales and staffing costs. Employees who are passionate about their jobs are more likely to be productive on a regular basis. According to Gallup data, companies with a high level of engagement show 22 per cent higher productivity. Today, the test isn't only barely holding talented people, but completely captivating them, capturing their psyches and hearts at any point of their working lives. It's more difficult to attract top talent than before. The aim of this empirical study was to learn more about the factors that influence employee engagement in the steel industry. Keywords: Employee Engagement, Perceived Organizational Support, Organizational Justice

The emotional and mental health impact of the murder of George Floyd on the US population

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed Black American male, was killed by a White police officer. Footage of the murder was widely shared. We examined the psychological impact of Floyd's death using two population surveys that collected data before and after his death; one from Gallup (117,568 responses from n = 47,355) and one from the US Census (409,652 responses from n = 319,471). According to the Gallup data, in the week following Floyd's death, anger and sadness increased to unprecedented levels in the US population. During this period, more than a third of the US population reported these emotions. These increases were more pronounced for Black Americans, nearly half of whom reported these emotions. According to the US Census Household Pulse data, in the week following Floyd's death, depression and anxiety severity increased among Black Americans at significantly higher rates than that of White Americans. Our estimates suggest that this increase corresponds to an additional 900,000 Black Americans who would have screened positive for depression, associated with a burden of roughly 2.7 million to 6.3 million mentally unhealthy days.

Physical pain, gender, and the state of the economy in 146 nations

RationalePhysical pain is one of the most severe of human experiences. It is thus one of the most important to understand. ObjectiveThis paper reports the first cross-country study of the links between physical pain and the state of the economy. A key issue examined is how the level of pain in a society is influenced by the unemployment rate. MethodsThe study uses pooled cross-sectional Gallup data from 146 countries (total N > 1.3 million). It estimates fixed-effects regression equations that control for personal characteristics. ResultsMore than a quarter of the world's citizens are in physical pain. Physical pain is lower in an economic boom and greater in an economic downturn. Estimated effect sizes are substantial. Remarkably, increases in pain are borne almost exclusively by women and found principally in rich nations. These findings have paradoxical aspects. The counter-cyclicality of physical pain is not what would be predicted by conventional economic analysis: during an expansion, people typically work harder and longer, and accidents and injuries increase. Nor are the study results due to unemployed citizens experiencing more pain (although they do). Instead, the study's findings are consistent with an important hypothesis proposed recently, using different kinds of evidence, by brain and behavioural-science researchers (e.g., Wiech and Tracey, 2009; Chou et al.; 2016). The hypothesis is that economic worry can create physical pain. ConclusionsThis study provides the first cross-country evidence that the level of physical pain in a nation depends on the state of the economy. Pain is high when the unemployment rate is high. That is not because of greater pain among people who lose their jobs — it extends far beyond that into wider society. The increase in physical pain in a downturn is experienced disproportionately by women.

Physical Pain, Gender, and the State of the Economy in 146 Nations

Rationale: Physical pain is one of the most severe of human experiences. It is thus one of the most important to understand. Objective: This paper reports the first cross-country study of the links between physical pain and the state of the economy. A key issue examined is how the level of pain in a society is influenced by the unemployment rate. Method: The study uses pooled cross-sectional Gallup data from 146 countries. It estimates fixed-effects regression equations that control for personal characteristics. Results: More than a quarter of the world's citizens are in physical pain. Physical pain is lower in a boom and greater in an economic downturn. Estimated effect-sizes are substantial. Remarkably, increases in pain are borne almost exclusively by women and found principally in rich nations. These findings have paradoxical aspects. The counter-cyclicality of physical pain is not what would be predicted by conventional economic analysis: during an expansion, people typically work harder and longer, and accidents and injuries increase. Nor are the paper's results due to unemployed citizens experiencing more pain (although they do). Instead, the study's findings are consistent with an important hypothesis proposed recently, using different kinds of evidence, by brain and behavioural-science researchers such as Katja Wiech and Irene Tracey (2009) and Eileen Chou and colleagues (2016). The hypothesis is that economic worry can create physical pain. Conclusions: This study provides the first cross-country evidence that the level of physical pain in a nation depends on the state of the economy. Pain is high when the unemployment rate is high. That is not because of greater pain among people who lose their jobs -- it extends far beyond that into wider society. The increase in physical pain in a downturn is experienced disproportionately by women.

Presidential Elections, Divided Politics, and Happiness in the USA

We examine the effects of the 2016 and 2012 US presidential election outcomes on subjective wellbeing across party identification. We use Gallup data and a regression discontinuity approach, and focus primarily on evaluative (life satisfaction) and hedonic (positive and negative affect) indicators. We find that both elections had strong negative wellbeing effects on those who identified with the losing party, with little or no increase in wellbeing for those identifying with the winning party. The negative effects for the losing side were larger in 2016 than in 2012, by a factor of three on some indicators, and were driven mainly by women and middle‐income households. As such, both elections had a net negative wellbeing effect, but more so in 2016. Local voting patterns did not have a substantial wellbeing impact, nor did congressional elections taking place the same day. In 2016, the election also changed respondents’ perceptions about the economy, their financial status, and their community. After both elections, hedonic wellbeing gaps across parties typically dissipated within two weeks, but there was more persistence in evaluative wellbeing gaps, especially in expected life satisfaction. The latter gap persisted throughout 2017.

Predictors of life satisfaction in the United Arab Emirates: Results based on Gallup data

The literature is rife with papers discussing the state of developed and developing economies with a number of commonalities around what drives life satisfaction. In sum, females, the educated and well off, younger and older generations, the married or partnered as well as employees with decent job prospects report higher life satisfaction. Yet, whether these hold true in a diverse, expatriate society transitioning from post-oil dependence to a knowledge economy, as is the case in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is unknown. Using survey data of a nationally representative sample collected by the Gallup Organization between the years of 2006 to 2017, we explore life satisfaction of more than 17,000 UAE residents and citizens. Our results show that the usual predictors found in other nations did not completely hold true. Age does not follow the usual U-shaped life satisfaction relationship in male or female citizens. Tertiary education contributes to life satisfaction only for men, but not women. Unemployment and the freedom to live one’s life as chosen have no significant impact. There remain culture-specific determinants of life satisfaction that require continued investigation, particularly in Middle Eastern nations such as the UAE.

Contract work at older ages

AbstractThe share of workers who are self-employed rises markedly with age. Given policy concerns about inadequate retirement savings, especially among those with lower education, and the resulting interest in encouraging employment at older ages, it is important to understand the role that self-employment arrangements play in facilitating work among seniors. New data from a survey module fielded on a Gallup telephone survey distinguish independent contractor work from other self-employment and provide information on informal and online platform work. The Gallup data show that, especially after accounting for individuals who are miscoded as employees, self-employment is even more prevalent at older ages than suggested by existing data. Work as an independent contractor is the most common type of self-employment. Roughly one-quarter of independent contractors aged 50 and older work for a former employer. At older ages, self-employment generally – and work as an independent contractor specifically – is more common among the highly educated, accounting for much of the difference in employment rates across education groups. We provide suggestive evidence that differences in opportunities for independent contractor work play an important role in the lower employment rates of less-educated older adults.

Estimating geographic subjective well-being from Twitter: A comparison of dictionary and data-driven language methods

Researchers and policy makers worldwide are interested in measuring the subjective well-being of populations. When users post on social media, they leave behind digital traces that reflect their thoughts and feelings. Aggregation of such digital traces may make it possible to monitor well-being at large scale. However, social media-based methods need to be robust to regional effects if they are to produce reliable estimates. Using a sample of 1.53 billion geotagged English tweets, we provide a systematic evaluation of word-level and data-driven methods for text analysis for generating well-being estimates for 1,208 US counties. We compared Twitter-based county-level estimates with well-being measurements provided by the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index survey through 1.73 million phone surveys. We find that word-level methods (e.g., Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count [LIWC] 2015 and Language Assessment by Mechanical Turk [LabMT]) yielded inconsistent county-level well-being measurements due to regional, cultural, and socioeconomic differences in language use. However, removing as few as three of the most frequent words led to notable improvements in well-being prediction. Data-driven methods provided robust estimates, approximating the Gallup data at up to r = 0.64. We show that the findings generalized to county socioeconomic and health outcomes and were robust when poststratifying the samples to be more representative of the general US population. Regional well-being estimation from social media data seems to be robust when supervised data-driven methods are used.

Daily weather only has small effects on wellbeing in the US

Average surface temperatures in the US are now 1.11° Celsius higher than a century ago, and the last years witnessed above-average precipitation. We combine the daily Gallup data and the Agricultural Analytics dataset to address the question of whether such changes in the weather have increased or decreased wellbeing. We find that warmer days are associated with reduced physical health, but higher levels of subjective wellbeing and a higher prevalence of positive emotions. These findings turn out to be completely non-robust, with effects reversing signs when one includes area and behavioural factors that themselves are endogenous. The only consistent result is that, irrespective of what one controls for, the effects are small, with equivalent wellbeing income variations for a 2° Celsius increase worth 0.3% of income.

Contract Work at Older Ages

The share of workers who are self-employed rises markedly with age. Given policy concerns about inadequate retirement savings, especially among those with lower education, and the resulting interest in encouraging employment at older ages, it is important to understand the role that self-employment arrangements play in facilitating work among seniors. New data from a survey module fielded on a Gallup telephone survey distinguish independent contractor work from other self-employment and provide information on informal and online platform work. The Gallup data show that, especially after accounting for individuals who are miscoded as employees, self-employment is even more prevalent at older ages than suggested by existing data. Work as an independent contractor is the most common type of self-employment. Roughly one-quarter of independent contractors age 50 and older work for a former employer. At older ages, self-employment generally—and work as an independent contractor specifically—is more common among the highly educated, accounting for much of the difference in employment rates across education groups. We provide suggestive evidence that differences in opportunities for independent contractor work play an important role in the lower employment rates of less-educated older adults. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Study Advocates New Approach Toward Workplace Mental Health

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 192949, “Mental Health in the Workplace: Leading Global Health Risk,” by Anna Feringa, Independent Consultant, prepared for the 2018 Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference, Abu Dhabi, 12–15 November. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Employers have an obligation to provide and maintain workplace safety, including managing workplace mental health. To that end, employers should implement preventive measures to optimize the fit between individual workers and their psychosocial, organizational, and physical working environment. This study incorporates previous learnings, as well as globally collected data, to develop a strategy that can be used to help implement an industry-specific mental health•program. Background One in four people worldwide will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. Approximately 450 million people currently suffer from such conditions, placing these disorders among the leading causes of ill health and disability worldwide. Amidst a background of necessary organizational change, evolving technology, and complex personnel needs, the workplace is emerging as a central risk to the ongoing mental health of workers across the globe. A workplace also can be an inadvertent risk to aggravate pre-existing issues. The increasing interdependence of work and health presents both an increased risk and a potential opportunity for workplaces to be better prepared to meet the needs of workers in most industrialized societies. Associated Costs Emerging evidence indicates that employers that prioritize mental health programs in the workplace experience an increase in individual and organizational performance. Failure to do so can incur significant direct and indirect costs. Direct costs associated with poor mental health management within an organization can include Absenteeism Turnover Health care and workers’ compensation claims Indirect costs can include Presenteeism (workers are present but are not working to full capacity) Lower employee engagement Increased interpersonal conflict or complaints While most employers notice absenteeism, they often overlook presenteeism. Despite the difficulty of obtaining an accurate measure of presenteeism, a study measuring health-related productivity estimated that individuals working with untreated illnesses cost employers $1,601 per person annually. A study of an employee assistance program demonstrated that 20% of lost productivity costs are the•result of absenteeism, but up to 80% are associated with presenteeism.• Employee Engagement Worldwide, employee engagement levels tend to be lower in industries characterized by more-routinized jobs, such as manufacturing and production. The conventional management approach in these industries often puts process ahead of people, as opposed to an employee-centered focus that promotes improved business performance. Gallup data collected during 2014–2016 across 155 countries indicate that only 15% of employees worldwide are classified as engaged in their job. Two-thirds are not engaged, and 18% are actively disengaged.

Sentiment Spillover: Evidence from Two Environmental Disasters

This paper studies the spillover effects of sentiment facilitated by social connection following the outbreak of two environmental disasters. Utilizing individual-level survey data from Gallup and county-level social connectivity data from Facebook, the paper finds that residents who are residing in more socially connected counties report significantly lower level of sentiment on the month of the event, and the effect persists through the next month. The findings are robust to alternative hypotheses, such as possible ties other than social connection and differing set of observable characterisitcs that alters underlying distribution of respondents’ sentiments in different regions.

Immigration Politics and Partisan Realignment: California, Texas, and the 1994 Election

AbstractThis article demonstrates how the party identification of various demographic groups in California and Texas changed in response to the gubernatorial campaigns of Pete Wilson and George W. Bush. Using aggregated time series of Field Poll, Texas Poll, and Gallup data, difference-in-differences results show that Wilson's embrace of Proposition 187 was followed by significant Hispanic movement toward the Democratic Party in California. Time series analysis substantiates that this action led to a long-term 7.1 percentage point Democratic shift among California's Hispanics. This suggests that state-level actors can influence partisan coalitions in their state, beyond what would be expected from national-level factors.