Introduction to a culturally sensitive measure of well-being: Combining life satisfaction and interdependent happiness across 49 different cultures

• Autor(a) principal: Kuba, K.
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Haas, B. W., Igou, E. R., Kosiarczyk, A., Kocimska-Bortnowska, A., Kwiatkowska, A., Lun, V. M.-C., Maricchiolo, F., Park, J., Šolcová, I. P., Sirlopú, D., Uchida, Y., Vauclair, C.- M., Vignoles, V. L., Zelenski, J. M., Adamovic, M., Akotia, C. S., Albert, I., Esteves, C., Bond, M. H.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/28742
• topic: Culture; Happiness; Well-being; Interdependent happiness; Life satisfaction; Cultural sensitivity; Selfhoods; Self-construals

How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when well-being is being measured according to the way people in country A think about well-being? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and interdependent happiness focusing on individual and family, collected mostly from students, across forty-nine countries. We demonstrate that the relative idealization of the two types of well-being varies across cultural contexts and are associated with culturally different models of selfhood. Furthermore, we show that rankings of societal well-being based on life satisfaction tend to underestimate the contribution from interdependent happiness. We introduce a new culturally sensitive method for calculating societal well-being, and examine its construct validity by testing for associations with the experience of emotions and with individualism-collectivism. This new culturally sensitive approach represents a slight, yet important improvement in measuring well-being.