Do Higher Educated People Feel Better in Everyday Life? Insights From a Day Reconstruction Method Study
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Do Higher Educated People Feel Better in Everyday Life? Insights From a Day Reconstruction Method Study Dave Möwisch1,3 · Annette Brose2 · Florian Schmiedek1 Accepted: 19 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Past research has shown a positive association between education and well-being. Much of this research has focused on the cognitive component of well-being (i.e., life satisfaction) as outcome. On the other hand, the affective component, that is, how often and intensively people experience positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in their everyday lives, has received far less attention. Therefore, we examined the association between education and PA and NA in everyday life, with a particular focus on affective experiences at the sub-facet level (based on a structure of NA with multiple factors). We used data from a nationally representative sample (N = 1647) of the German Socioeconomic Panel Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS), employing the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) to capture affective experiences of everyday activities. Multilevel structural equation models revealed that (1) education was not related to PA, but (2) was positively associated with two subfacets of NA (mourning/worries and loneliness/boredom); (3) income might in part explain the association between education and NA; (4) education does not particularly seem to serve as a resource in times of unemployment or retirement (i.e., there were no interactions between education and unemployment/retirement regarding well-being) In essence, higher educated people reported fewer negative emotions in everyday life than their lower educated counterparts, but not more positive emotions. The findings underline that different facets of NA, in addition to life satisfaction, are relevant variables related to education and should receive more attention in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of non-monetary correlates of education. Keywords Education · Affect · Well-being · Day reconstruction method · SOEP-innovation sample
This research was funded by the grant NimoErt1 from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). We thank Oliver Huxhold for helpful advice. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1120 5-020-02472-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Dave Möwisch [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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1 Introduction The field of research on subjective well-being (SWB) is one of the fastest growing areas in social and life sciences (Diener and Scollon 2014), with many publications on antecedents and consequences of feeling well. SWB is associated with several positive outcomes such as health, social relationships, and resilience (Diener et al. 1999; Kansky and Diener 2017). Furthermore, there is growing interest in how to promote SWB at the individual and national levels (Kahneman et al. 2004a). For example, economists are interest
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