Abstract

Research has identified several factors that affect life satisfaction. The role of the state in this context, however, has been considered in only a few studies. Analyses of the relationships between national policies and life satisfaction have shown that the welfare state functions as a “resource giver” in creating inequalities in people’s quality of life. For this reason, we studied whether and how the effects of social resources on life satisfaction differ from country to country. Applying a multilevel analysis, we examined the resources embedded in networks and personal resources at one level as well as macro-information regarding the welfare state at another level. To this end, we used data from 27 countries drawn from the 2017 Social Networks Module of the International Social Survey Program and the United Nations Human Development Index. The results show that 7.4% of overall variance is at the country level. This can be partly explained by perceived inequality in a country, which we constructed for each country based on individual respondent data. Furthermore, in random-slopes analyses, we find evidence for country-specific effects of one of our central variables, goal attainment.

摘要

研究已经确定了影响生活满意度的几个因素。然而，只有少数研究考虑了国家在这方面的作用。对国家政策与生活满意度之间关系的分析表明，福利国家在造成人们生活质量不平等方面发挥着“资源提供者”的作用。出于这个原因，我们研究了社会资源对生活满意度的影响是否以及如何因国家而异。应用多层次分析，我们在一个层次上检查了网络中嵌入的资源和个人资源，并在另一个层次上检查了有关福利国家的宏观信息。为此，我们使用了来自 27 个国家/地区的数据，这些数据来自国际社会调查计划的 2017 年社交网络模块和联合国人类发展指数。结果表明，7.4% 的总体差异在国家层面。这可以部分解释为一个国家的感知不平等，我们根据个人受访者数据为每个国家构建。此外，在随机斜率分析中，我们发现了我们的核心变量之一目标实现对特定国家/地区的影响的证据。