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Subjective Well-being Among Young People in Transition to Adulthood

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Abstract

This study used a nationally representative sample of young people in Germany from the German Socio-Economic Panel to examine how demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the young persons and their parents, personality traits of the young persons, quality and quantity of relationships, the parent's level of life satisfaction, and other measures of satisfaction for the young person are related to the initial assessment of life satisfaction by the individual at the critical point of transition from adolescence to adulthood. The results indicated that consistency existed across different domains of satisfaction, specifically satisfaction with life and satisfaction with grades. A strong pattern of association was also observed between the subjective well-being of the adolescents and variables that measured different dimensions of the quality and quantity of interpersonal relationships, including relationships with parents.

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Notes

  1. Kahneman et al. (1999) also provide an excellent and comprehensive set of articles that systematically reviews all the major components of well-being and hedonic psychology.

  2. See SOEP Group (2001) for a detailed description of the survey. Full copies of all the questionnaires are available in English at www.diw.de/english/sop/service/fragen/index.html.

  3. Income is imputed in case of item-non-response. See Frick and Grabka, 2005 for a discussion of the imputation method.

  4. In our preliminary regressions, we also include unemployment measures for the father, but in no equation were these variables significant—a finding that may result from a compounding of the effect of no father versus unemployed father.

  5. .124 (coefficient) multiplied by (2 times the standard deviation of subjective life satisfaction of mother 1.85) = .46.

  6. Please note that the negative coefficient on grades stems from how grades are awarded in Germany—a “one” represents the highest grade possible; a “six” the lowest possible grade.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank an anonymous reviewer, Gert Wagner, Martin Kroh, Stephen Jenkins and participants at the DIW Seminar Series and at the Cornell University Policy Analyses and Management Seminar Series for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. All remaining errors and deficiencies are of course the authors’ own responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Work, Wayne State University, 340 Thompson Home, 4756 Cass Avenue, Detroit, MI, 48202, USA

    Eileen Trzcinski

  2. SOEP German Institute for Economic Research, 14191, Berlin, Germany

    Elke Holst

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  1. Eileen Trzcinski
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  2. Elke Holst
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Correspondence to Eileen Trzcinski.

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Trzcinski, E., Holst, E. Subjective Well-being Among Young People in Transition to Adulthood. Soc Indic Res 87, 83–109 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-007-9160-0

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