Abstract
This paper explores the working hours-happiness relationship of Latinos living in the United States and compares it with that of the host society. We find that immigrant Latinos have adopted American work-happiness relationships while having lower levels of subjective well-being. Acculturation plays an important role not only with respect to work attitudes, but also to social status, and it is the latter that affects the well-being of Latinos of color. Future quality-of-life research needs to analyze whether the dichotomy between work attitude and social status will persist or whether this vibrant and increasing group of immigrants who are so vital to the U.S. economy will both adapt to host society values and begin to introduce positive change in those values in a society where multiculturalism is on the rise.
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Notes
‘Latinos’ and ‘Hispanics’ are used interchangeably in this paper. However, it would be more accurate to use ‘Latinos’ because Brazilians and Latinos from francophone countries in the Caribbean do not consider themselves to be Hispanic.
Acculturation is the cultural and psychological change that emerges during this process. Acculturation is the first step in what Gordon (1964) argued was a seven-step process of assimilation:
We use “happiness” and “life satisfaction” synonymously. The terms are not to be confused with satisfaction with job.
For a detailed overview of the ordinal regression model using a latent variable see Long and Freese (2006). OLS results are included in Appendix 4 for comparison, as several recent studies have shown ordered logit and OLS to be comparable (Ferrer-i Carbonell and Frijters 2004; Van Praag and Ferrer-i Carbonell 2004; Blanchflower and Oswald 2011). Given that the dataset is a cross-sectional survey based on subjective assessments, selection bias and unobserved variable bias can be potential limitations to the analysis.
The data come from the General Social Survey (GSS). Respondents were asked the following question: Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?
It is important to acknowledge that working hours might be affected by unobservable factors such as personality traits that are also important determinants of subjective well-being.
For a list of U.S. regions refer to Appendix 3.
When running a brand test for the parallel odds assumption we found that it was violated, which is actually quite common (Long and Freese 2006). Therefore, we ran mlogit and gologit2 regressions, and our results were virtually the same. We ran additional tests, such as the BIC test and it showed that the ologit was the best model in comparison to mlogit and gologit (see Appendix 5). A fairly common practice when the proportion odds is violated is to just ignore it since the practical implications of violating this assumption are minimal (Williams 2014; Long and Freese 2006). Since our results did not change when the models were refitted relaxing the proportional odds constraint for the relevant predictors, we report the ORM and OLS results because they are much easier to interpret.
These models may suffer from left out variable bias, however. We controlled for variables suggested by the literature such as age, race, gender, income, education, marital status, and religion (Myers 2000), but it is possible that other control variables may have been omitted. Myers (2000) for example argues that four traits mark happy people: high self-esteem, a sense of personal control, optimism, and extroversion. These trait-happiness correlations are not yet fully understood and findings inherently suffer from causality problems. Some traits may predispose to happiness, while happiness also be a contributing cause and there are many other factors that might correlate with happiness as well. Likewise, it is important to acknowledge that it is possible that people who are less family-oriented and are more work-oriented are the ones who move to the U.S.
Occupation variables were also included and tested in the models, but did not affect the results. Likewise, we tested the models including ‘health’ as control, but it did not change our findings. Refer to Appendix 4.
To account for any nonlinear effects of working hours on happiness several models were run using different measurements of working hours. We re-ran model W1 (Latino US resident vs. Non-Latino US resident) using different measurements of working hours. In Model W1a working hours are divided into seven categories, in Model W1b working hours is a raw number ranging from 0 to 89 hours, in Model W1c a dummy variable was used for a person working more than 40 hours, and in Model W1d a dummy variable for a person working less than 40 hours was used. In all models there is no significant difference in happiness levels among Latinos and non-Latinos when working longer hours. These are presented in Appendix 4 as robustness checks that reinforce our conclusions.
When taking into account several dimensions of happiness combined, studies find that Scandinavian countries are the happiest (Sachs et al. 2012). Gallup measures positive emotions, such as laughter, smile and enjoyment, which is only an ingredient of happiness, other reports such as the World Happiness Reports, show that Americans are happier on reflective happiness measures.
A possible explanation is the fact that much of the Hispanic immigration is undocumented. Unfortunately, GSS does not ask respondents about their immigration status and we cannot test whether this does in fact contributes to their overall unhappiness. Notice, however, that immigrant Latinos are much unhappier in relationship to native born Latinos in Fig. 4.
Term coined by Alejandro Lipschutz in 1944 to refer to inequalities based on ethnoracial categories and skin color (Lipschutz 1944).
According to Hofstede (1984, 2001) countries are characterized by a dominant cultural mainstream, or social paradigm, and varied along four separate dimensions: individualism vs. collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity. It is to the first dimension ‘individualism’ that we refer. A thorough account of the modern theory of individualism/collectivism is provided by Triandis (2001); Triandis and Gelfand (2011).
Unfortunately, GSS does not provide data on immigrants’ length of stay.
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Appendices
Appendix A: Variables in the GSS dataset
Appendix B: Sample details
Happiness by average working hour for Latinos in the U.S. with stdev. Source: GSS
Predicted probability of being ‘very happy’ for Model W1. Source: GSS
Predicted probability of being ‘very happy’ by race category. Source: GSS
Appendix C: U.S. regions
Appendix D: OLR and OLS regressions of happiness
Appendix E: Measures of fit
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Valente, R.R., L. Berry, B.J. Acculturation of Immigrant Latinos into the U.S. Workplace: Evidence from the Working Hours-life Satisfaction Relationship. Applied Research Quality Life 12, 451–479 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-016-9471-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-016-9471-x