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Personality and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from South Korea

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Abstract

Although the statistically significant relationship between personality traits and subjective well-being (i.e., self-reported happiness and life satisfaction) is well-known in the field of positive psychology, some scholars still cast doubt on the external validity of this finding and the strength of personality dimensions vis-à-vis other individual-level determinants of subjective well-being such as income, employment status, marital status, self-reported health, and so on. Using a nationally representative, face-to-face survey fielded in South Korea in 2009, we find that personality traits (measured by the Five-factor Model)—particularly, Emotional Stability and Extraversion—are positively associated with happiness and life satisfaction, after controlling for other covariates. The effects of personality traits are often on par with, and sometimes even greater than, those of other well-known determinants.

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Notes

  1. A few studies have examined the relationship between personality and subjective well-being using college student samples in South Korea, but they focus on personality traits (e.g., self-esteem and optimism) that are conceptually different from the “Big Five” (e.g., Cha 2003).

  2. The codebooks and cumulative data of the 2003–2009 KGSS are available at http://www.kossda.or.kr/eng/.

  3. The response rate of 63.4% is slightly lower than that of the General Social Survey in the United States, which is usually over 70%. A comparison with the Korean Census suggests that it does not undermine the demographic representativeness of the survey.

  4. Some of previous literature (e.g., Campbell et al. 1976) consider happiness (unlike life satisfaction) as an affective orientation. Though conceptual difference between life satisfaction and happiness clearly exists, recent studies (e.g., Lucas and Diener 2008) tend to put them in the same dimension, presumably because happiness in the survey setting is believed not to tap on affective dimension. In surveys, questions on life satisfaction and happiness lead respondents to evaluate one’s quality of life retrospectively, and the answers will be a weighted sum of reflective judgments of one’s life. In order to grasp affective orientation that happiness involves, it will be better to rely on experience sampling that allows us to track down one’s emotional experiences in daily life.

  5. The first author translated the TIPI into Korean. We did not compare the Korean TIPI with other, longer personality batteries in Korean because it would not be particularly helpful to build construct validity of the Korea TIPI for two reasons. First, the longer batteries available in South Korea are not validated ones, which are basically translated in Korean from English, not created through a series of factor analysis of Korean adjectives from scratch. Therefore, though we know that the Korean version of the “Big Five” based on longer batteries is by and large similar to its English version, we cannot rule out the possibility that there are some noticeable differences between them, presumably due to some unobservable problems in translation (e.g., Schmitt et al. 2007). Second, even though we assume that the “Big Five” measured by longer batteries of Korean adjectives is quite reliable, it is practically impossible to add them to a face-to-face, nationally representative, survey because they are too long to be included. It may be possible to compare the TIPI with longer measures used in previous studies (e.g., Yik et al. 2002), but it will not be helpful because of some fundamental differences between convenience samples from the college student body and a nationally representative sample that covers the whole population.

  6. For a partial list of research that has used the TIPI and its translated versions, see Samuel Gosling’s website: http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/gosling/scales_we.htm (last visited on February 2, 2012).

  7. A detailed discussion on the relationship between socio-demographic factors and subjective well-being is available at Argyle (2001) and Dolan et al. (2008).

  8. For the reasons we stated above, we did not conduct mediation analysis to identify causal mechanism here.

  9. In another set of models, we also consider the province-level fixed effects, to ensure that our results are not the products of some correlation between personality traits and other factors that might affect subjective well-being (e.g., province-level socio-cultural differences). The results are fairly similar to those reported here (available upon request from the authors).

  10. In this context, it is very suggestive that the relationship between personality and political ideology does not elegantly replicate well-established findings in the US and Europe (e.g., Gerber et al. 2010; Jost et al. 2009). An exploratory analysis shows that Openness is positively associated with political liberalism, but Conscientiousness is not necessarily associated with political conservatism in South Korea.

  11. We report the min-max effects here in order to make our interpretation straightforward. It is also easy to calculate other types of marginal effects (e.g., from mean to maximum, from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile, etc) following the same procedure. It is also doable to report the changes in predicted probability of choosing another value in the dependent variable (e.g., 2 “dissatisfied/unhappy” instead of 4 “satisfied/happy”).

  12. The finding that Emotional Stability has larger effect than Extraversion is also reported in previous meta-analysis (e.g., DeNeve and Cooper 1998; Steel et al. 2008). Unfortunately, we do not have any convincing answer for this. On the one hand, previous research is silent on this finding. On the other hand, theoretical pieces (e.g., Gray 1991) do not suggest that BIS (behavioral inhibition system)—linked with Emotional Stability—is more active than BAS (behavioral activation system)—linked with Extraversion. Hence, we believe this issue is a theoretically daunting task that cannot be resolved empirically, and therefore it is beyond the range and scope of this paper.

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Acknowledgment

This paper was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean goverment (NRF-2010-330-B00128).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Brooklyn College-City University of New York, 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 11210, USA

    Shang E. Ha

  2. Department of Sociology, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea

    Seokho Kim

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  1. Shang E. Ha
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Correspondence to Shang E. Ha.

Appendices

Appendix A: Variable Coding and Question Wording

1.1 Personality: TIPI (10 Trait Pairs)

Here are a number of personality traits that may or may not apply to you. Please write a number next to each statement to indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with that statement. You should rate the extent to which the pair of traits applies to you, even if one characteristic applies more strongly than the other. I see myself as:

  • Extraversion Extraverted, enthusiastic; Reserved, quiet (Reverse coded)

  • Agreeableness Sympathetic, warm; Critical, quarrelsome (Reverse coded)

  • Conscientiousness Dependable, self-disciplined; Disorganized, careless (Reverse coded)

  • Emotional Stability Calm, emotionally stable; Anxious, easily upset (Reverse coded)

  • Openness: Open to new experiences, complex; Conventional, uncreative (Reverse coded)

(1 = Disagree strongly; 2 = Disagree moderately; 3 = Disagree a little; 4 = Neither agree nor disagree; 5 = Agree a little; 6 = Agree moderately; 7 = Agree strongly. Responses rescaled to range from 0 to 1.)

1.2 Subjective Well-Being

Life Satisfaction “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” (1 = Very Dissatisfied; 5 = Very Satisfied)

Happiness “”If you were to consider your life in general these days, how happy or unhappy would you say you are?” (1 = Very unhappy; 5 = Very happy)

1.3 Other

Female 0 = Male; 1 = Female

Age Years

Education 0 = No Schooling; 1 = Elementary School; 2 = Middle School; 3 = High School; 4 = 2-year College; 5 = Bachelor’s Degree; 6 = Master’s Degree; 7 = Doctoral Degree

Family income (Monthly) 0 = No Income; 1 = Less than 500,000 Won; 2 = 500,000 Won-990,000 Won; 3 = 1,000,000 Won-1,490,000 Won; 4 = 1,500,000 Won-1,990,000 Won; 5 = 2,000,000 Won-2,490,000 Won; 6 = 2,500,000 Won-2,990,000 Won; 7 = 3,000,000 Won-3,490,000 Won; 8 = 3,500,000 Won-3,990,000 Won; 9 = 4,000,000 Won-4,490,000 Won; 10 = 4,500,000 Won-4,990,000 Won; 11 = 5,000,000 Won-5,490,000 Won; 12 = 5,500,000 Won-5,990,000 Won; 13 = 6,000,000 Won-6,490,000 Won; 14 = 6,500,000 Won-6,990,000 Won; 15 = 7,000,000 Won-7,490,000 Won; 16 = 7,500,000 Won-7,990,000 Won; 17 = 8,000,000 Won-8,490,000 Won; 18 = 8,500,000 Won-8,900,000 Won; 19 = 9,000,000 Won-9,490,000 Won; 20 = 9,500,000 Won-9,990,000 Won; 21 = More than 10,000,000 Won (Approximately 1 USD = 1,200 Won)

Trust 1 = Can’t be too careful in dealing with people; 2 = Depends; 3 = Most people can be trusted

Financial Satisfaction 1 = Very dissatisfied; 2 = Somewhat dissatisfied; 3 = Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied; 4 = Somewhat Satisfied; 5 = Very satisfied

Health 1 = Poor; 2 = Fair; 3 = Good; 4 = Very Good; 5 = Excellent

Political Ideology 1 = Very Liberal; 2 = Somewhat Liberal; 3 = Moderate; 4 = Somewhat Conservative; 5 = Very Conservative

Political Participation 0 = None; 1 = Participated in At Least One Mode of Political Activity (among voting, signing petition, boycotting, participating in demonstration, attending political meeting, contacting politician, contacting media, donating, and joining Internet forum)

Attend Church or Temple 1 = Never; 2 = Once for a few years; 3 = Once per year; 4 = A few times per year; 5 = Once per month; 6 = A few time per month; 7 = Once per week; 8 = A few times per week

Employment Status (Dummies) Employed (reference category); Student; Homemaker; Retired; Unemployed

Marital Status (Dummies) Married; Widowed; Separated or Divorced; Never Married (reference category)

Appendix B

See Table 4.

Table 4 Summary statistics of the variables included in the models
Full size table

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Ha, S.E., Kim, S. Personality and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from South Korea. Soc Indic Res 111, 341–359 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0009-9

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