麻豆淫院

Many survey-based studies have been conducted to try to understand how happiness changes over a person's lifetime. While there have been a few different outcomes, the most common has been the U-shaped curve. This pattern indicates that, on average, people are happier at the beginning of adulthood, they experience a dip during midlife (the so-called "midlife crisis"), and happiness then increases again in old age. Yet, other similar studies have reported inconsistent patterns鈥攕teady happiness throughout life, steady increases, steady decreases or even inverse U-shapes.

Now, Fabian Kratz and Josef Br眉derl from Ludwig the Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, argue that the widely reported U-shape is largely an artifact of methodological biases, instead of a robust empirical pattern. Their study, recently in European Sociological Review, describes a different pattern, in which happiness declines slowly through adulthood, slightly increases in the early 60s (or the "golden ages"), then declines steeply in old age.

Initially, the team sought to find an explanation for the variance among studies in happiness versus age patterns and to determine a set of "best practices" for working with these kinds of studies. They used survey data from the long-term German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), taken from 1984 to 2017.

They say, "The social sciences have faced a challenge regarding the replication of research findings, raising concerns about the credibility of results. An illustrative case pertains to research on age-related changes in subjective well-being (SWB)."

In an attempt to remedy this problem, they decided to take a different route than their predecessors. "This study aims to demonstrate how insights from the modern causal inference literature can help explain the contradictory findings in this research field. We use these insights to develop a theoretically informed and empirically validated research design, to which we refer as the 'best-practice design.'"

Their work involves identifying a set of common biases, including things like social desirability, in which participants report higher happiness levels due to societal expectations. Survivorship bias is another common problem in these studies. As people get older, those that are unhappy tend to have more health issues or may die by suicide, leaving the healthier and happier people to continue filling out surveys, and thus creating the upward happiness trend in late life.

The team also wanted to avoid overcontrol, by not controlling mediators like health or employment. They say, "Overcontrol occurs when analysts control for mediating variables鈥攊.e., variables caused by age that also affect SWB. A growing body of causal inference literature clearly demonstrates that controlling for mediating mechanisms distorts estimates of total causal effects. The rationale is clear: including such variables distorts the causal effect by explaining away part of its mechanism."

To prove that these biases lead to the results from prior studies, the team also replicated older results using different combinations of biases and what they believe were misspecifications of data. They say the U-shape is a common result of these designs.

Finally, their improved best-practice design results in the steep decline of happiness after the late-60s. They also find no evidence for the midlife crisis.

"Overall, our findings do not support the notion of a U-curve, at least not in the sense in which it is often conceived. There is no basis for concluding that people in old age become happier again. Even the small increase during the golden ages can hardly be interpreted as evidence of a U-curve, since SWB remains well below happiness levels in the 20s, and the sharp decline follows immediately. Furthermore, we would argue that the dip in happiness around age 58 can hardly be interpreted as an indication of a midlife crisis, since the decline in happiness is gradual throughout adulthood," the authors write.

Still, there is no definitive, objective way to measure happiness. Subjective reports may be unreliable, and even if they are not, happiness over a lifetime can also vary by culture and location. The study authors note these limitations, as their data is only based on German surveys. They also note that compositional variables or contextual factors may not be fully captured.

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