Life Satisfaction Sixty Years after World War II: the Lasting Impact of War Across Generations

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Life Satisfaction Sixty Years after World War II: the Lasting Impact of War Across Generations Sara Kijewski 1 Received: 2 May 2018 / Accepted: 1 April 2019/ # The International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) and Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract Each year, wars disrupt the lives of thousands of people around the globe. Yet, we still know relatively little about the long-term consequences of war for individual satisfaction with life, in particular across generations. In this study, we analyze how war experience influences life satisfaction sixty years after the Second World War with the help of individual survey-data from thirty-four countries (N = 25,618) from 2010. Drawing from related literatures exploring the long-term impact of traumatic experiences, we not only examine how such experiences influence individual levels of life satisfaction among those directly affected by the war, but also its impact on their descendants’ level of life satisfaction. Our findings indicate that war experiences continue to be related to lower levels of life satisfaction even six decades after the end of the war, both among members of the war generation and subsequent generations. This effect is remarkably robust and extends to individuals born decades after the war as well as increases in magnitude with age. Keywords Life satisfaction . Well-being . War . World war II . Inter-generational

transmission . Long-term consequences . Trauma

Introduction Each year, war disrupts and changes the lives of thousands of individuals around the globe. Beyond the immediate costs of war in terms of the high number of human lives, the destruction of physical capital, the disruption of economic activity, displacement, and reduced public health (Chen et al. 2008; Humphreys and Weinstein 2006; Welsch 2008), wars also inflict great personal loss and physical and mental suffering on the people affected through a range of potentially traumatizing events and persistent insecurity (Briere and Scott 2014; Rosner and Powell 2006). Yet, although human

* Sara Kijewski [email protected]

1

Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, 3012 Bern, Switzerland

S. Kijewski

well-being could be viewed as Bthe ultimate ‘dependent variable’ in social science^ (Helliwell and Putnam 2004), we still know relatively little about how war influences individuals’ well-being (Frey 2011: 226). Considered one of the Bmajor transformative events^ of the last century (Kesternich et al. 2014), causing millions of deaths, largescale displacement, major destruction of physical capital, and obstruction of economic activity, the Second World War (WWII) changed the lives of millions of people. Such traumatic events may have a severe negative impact on those directly exposed as well as on others bearing the distress—in particular, family members who were not directly exposed to the event (Figley 2002). In this paper, we examine the lasting impact of individual war experiences during WWII on individuals’ and their family members’ sat

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