Anthony Bardo - Duke University
"What Makes Life Good? A Life Course Analysis of Life Satisfaction"
Date: 11/05/2015 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Gross Hall - 270
Organizer: Laura Satterfield
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
Additional Comments: ABSTRACT: How does life improve and/or worsen with age? On the one hand, there is a rich gerontological literature that documents age-related declines in objective components of life quality, such as health and wealth. On the other hand, the relationship between age and subjective well-being (SWB) is relatively unknown. For example, how is SWB distributed across age, across society over time, and across birth cohorts? Domain satisfaction is a particularly useful measure to examine life-course patterns in SWB, because it can reflect both domain-specific satisfaction (e.g., satisfaction with family, friends, place of residence, health, and hobbies) and overall life satisfaction. Nationally representative data (i.e., GSS 1973-1994) and hierarchal age-period-cohort analysis (Yang and Land 2006) are utilized to examine life-course patterns in overall domain satisfaction and domain-specific satisfaction. I find that overall domain satisfaction slightly declines across the life span and is relatively stable across society over time. While age-period-cohort trends in overall domain satisfaction are found to be relatively stable, it is expected that satisfaction across specific domains varies more substantially. Indeed, satisfaction with health and family declines sharply across the life span while satisfaction with place of residence increases at an almost comparable rate. These conflicting domain-specific satisfaction trajectories produce the small age effect observed in overall domain satisfaction. It is not completely surprising to find that satisfaction with health and family decreases with age and satisfaction with place of residence increases, but it is interesting to find that domain-specific satisfaction is stable across cohorts. Do comparable domain-specific satisfaction ratings across cohorts reflect a lack of influence from shared formative life experiences? Findings from this study are further discussed in terms of my ongoing work that uses the same analytic framework coupled with a useful cohort typology (Hughes and O’Rand 2004) to further understand life-course patterns in SWB.