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Family Constellations and Life Satisfaction in Europe

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Abstract

Existing research on family and well-being has generally focused on the traditional family, and has largely ignored the increasing diversity in family forms and relations. Our aim in this paper is to help fill this gap by investigating the extent of the relationship between living arrangements and life satisfaction (LS) in Europe. We examined variations in life satisfaction by applying a multilevel approach (i.e., individuals nested in countries) to data from the 2007 European Quality of Life Survey. First, we found that levels of life satisfaction among families consisting of couples with children were significantly higher than among people in other (less typical) family arrangements. Second, our results illustrate that after the socioeconomic situation of the family was taken into account, the influence of family status on LS disappeared almost completely. Overall, our findings suggest that the lower levels of life satisfaction experienced by people living in atypical families can be largely attributed to their weaker socioeconomic position.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, we mainly refer to “life satisfaction,” but we may cite papers in which the focus is on “happiness” or “well-being.” This is standard practice (Easterlin 2004; Baranowska 2010; Mencarini and Sironi 2010). Subjective well-being is in fact a broad category which involves positive and negative feelings, expressions of happiness, as well as cognitive judgments of life satisfaction (Diener et al. 1999). These components of subjective well-being are often substantially correlated and the terms describing its various dimensions can be used interchangeably.

  2. The methodological and fieldwork reports concerning the 2007 EQLS are available at: www.eurofound.europa.eu/.

  3. Since it is not possible to simultaneously estimate the overall intercept β0 and all the C-1 thresholds, the identification problem is usually solved by either omitting the overall constant from linear predictor (i.e. β0 = 0) or fixing the first threshold to zero (i.e. α0 = 0). We opted for the first solution.

  4. The indicator refers to a person who is capable of and available to participate in paid work, but is unable to find suitable employment, including individuals who had not previously been employed.

  5. The findings of an analysis carried out separately for age classes suggest that this result was driven by the results concerning adult and elderly people (i.e., couples whose sons were grown and had likely left the nest; results not shown). For women, the overall non-significant effect of living in couples without children (see Table 2) hides different associations at different ages, as women at the end of their reproductive lives (35–49 years old) reported significantly lower levels of LS in the absence of children (results not shown).

  6. The analysis differentiated by age suggests that this was especially true for adult men living with their mother-in-law (results not shown).

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Acknowledgments

We thank the chair, the discussant, and the participants of the session “European Families and Well-Being” of the Population Association of America annual meeting in 2012 (San Francisco—US), as well as of the session “Quality of Life in Europe” of the XI International Society for Quality-of-Life-Studies Conference in 2012 (Venice, Italy). We also thank Filomena Maggino for her comments on an earlier version of the paper. The Journal’s review report also improved the paper.

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  1. Dipartimento di Statistica, Informatica, Applicazioni “G. Parenti” (DiSIA), University of Florence, Viale GB Morgagni 59, 50134, Florence, Italy

    Daniele Vignoli, Elena Pirani & Silvana Salvini

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  1. Daniele Vignoli
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  2. Elena Pirani
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  3. Silvana Salvini
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Correspondence to Daniele Vignoli.

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Table 4 Descriptive statistics
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Vignoli, D., Pirani, E. & Salvini, S. Family Constellations and Life Satisfaction in Europe. Soc Indic Res 117, 967–986 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-013-0372-1

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