Another point - there is a reference group effect. In a country with high levels of social stratification, people in the "middle" will report higher levels of subjective satisfaction than people in the "middle" of countries with lower level of social stratification, because they reference groups are different. The former are much better off than the underclass (their reference group) and say so in the survey. The latter are not that much different than anyone else, so their subjective perceptions are lower relative to their reference.
Finally, I think Joanna is absolutely correct - there is a cultural difference between the US and Europe in how whining is perceived. That may explain quite a bit about the differences in subjective perceptions.
In general, cross-national comparisons of absolute scores of subjective scales are pretty meaningless because of these cultural differences. A better way is comparison of relative scores, that is how satisfaction in A compares to satisfaction in B for the same country sample or even respondent and then compare relative positions of A cross-nationally (which is what Kahneman did.)
Wojtek
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 7:09 PM, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Or try another: The metro area with the nation’s worst access to basic
>> necessities also has the highest optimism about becoming a better place to
>> live. Welcome to McAllen, Edinburg and Mission, Texas.
>>
>
> Daniel Kahneman wrote a great paper where he looked at subjective
> well-being -- which is typically measured by self-evaluated life
> satisfaction -- in the US and France. The US has famously high SWB; in
> France it's famously low. The difference is very large: half a standard
> deviation, the same size as the difference between an American employed
> person and unemployed person. DK asked whether this finding is credible and
> hypothesized that it was not. So he did something clever. He looked at
> subjective health status (where people rate whether they're in good health).
> Not surprisingly, across 100+ countries and hundreds of thousands of
> respondents, the correlation between SHS and SWB is extremely high -- 0.85.
> People who think they're very healthy are also very likely to say they're
> highly satisfied with their lives. And the same holds true with the US and
> France: American SHS is much higher than France's, by about the same margin
> as with SWB. The problem, of course, is that *objectively* Americans' health
> status is by almost every measure significantly worse than France's (heart
> disease, diabetes, obesity, mental health). Kahneman said it is therefore
> reasonable to conclude that subjective health status is substantially
> "reality-free" (his term). And since SHS is so tightly correlated with
> evaluated life-satisfaction, one has to conclude that the latter, too, is,
> at least cross-culturally, largely "reality-free."
>
> SA
>
>
>
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