Bryson, Alexander;
Blanchflower, David G;
(2023)
Seasonality and the female happiness paradox.
Quality and Quantity: international journal of methodology
10.1007/s11135-023-01628-5.
(In press).
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Abstract
Most studies tracking wellbeing do not collect data across all the months in a year. This leads to error in estimating gender differences in wellbeing for three reasons. First, there are seasonal patterns in wellbeing (particularly life satisfaction and happiness) which are gendered, so failure to account for those confounds estimates of gender differences over time. Second, studies fielded in discrete parts of the year cannot extrapolate to gender differences in other parts of the year. Making inferences about trends over time is particularly problematic when a survey changes its field survey dates across years. Third, without monthly data, surveys miss big shifts in wellbeing that occur for short periods. This is a problem because women’s wellbeing is more variable over short periods of time than men’s wellbeing. It also bounces back faster. We show that simply splitting the data by months in a happiness equation generates a positive male coefficient in one subset of months from September to January and a negative coefficient in months February to August. Such a split has no impact on the male coefficients in an anxiety equation. Months matter.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Seasonality and the female happiness paradox |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s11135-023-01628-5 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-023-01628-5 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Happiness, Unhappiness, Anxiety, Life satisfaction, COVID, Gender |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10164485 |
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