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Measures of subjective well-being are increasingly prominent in international policy discussions about how best to measure "societal progress" and the well-being of national populations. This has implications for national statistical offices, as calls have been made for them to include measures of subjective well-being in their household surveys (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 2013). Statistics Canada has included measures of subjective well-being—particularly life satisfaction—in its surveys for twenty-five years, although the wording of these questions and the response categories have evolved over time. Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey (GSS) and Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) offer a valuable opportunity to examine the stability of life satisfaction responses and their correlates from year to year using a consistent analytical framework.
Capitalizing on the strengths of these surveys, this paper addresses two questions. First, how much variability is observed from year to year and across surveys in the distribution of life satisfaction responses? Second, how much variability is observed in the direction and magnitude of the correlation between life satisfaction and a consistent set of socioeconomic characteristics?
This study is based on seven years of the GSS (2003, 2005, 2006, and 2008 to 2011) and three years of the CCHS (2009 to 2011). In these survey years, the wording and scales for the life satisfaction question are generally consistent. The yearly sample size of the GSS ranges from about 15,400 to about 23,600 respondents. The yearly sample size of the CCHS ranges from about 61,700 to about 63,540. Only respondents aged 15 years or older are included in the analysis.
Evidence from multiple years of the GSS and the CCHS indicates that most survey respondents are able and willing to answer questions about their satisfaction with life. The incidence of item non-response is generally less than 2%. It is only slightly higher than the incidence of non-response on many standard demographic variables and much less than that for questions about household income.
The study shows that the mean level of life satisfaction reported in the seven cycles of the GSS varies from year to year, but remains stable over the three years of the CCHS. Among the seven cycles of GSS, overall life satisfaction scores were the lowest in 2005 and 2010 and the highest in 2009. The placement of the life satisfaction question in the 2005 and 2010 surveys and these surveys’ focus on time use are possible reasons for the lower levels of reported life satisfaction in these years. The time-use survey content has a particularly large effect on the levels of reported life satisfaction of prime-working-age groups. The relatively high life satisfaction scores in 2009 could be due to the survey content—victimization—where many respondents’ attention may have been drawn to the fact that they were not victimized in the recent past.
Regardless of the year-to-year variability in average levels of life satisfaction, the direction and magnitude of the relationship between life satisfaction and common socioeconomic characteristics is generally consistent from year to year, irrespective of the content of each individual GSS and CCHS cycle. These results reinforce the point made in numerous previous studies that self-assessed life satisfaction reports are consistently informative measures of life experiences. One implication of this is that pooling the GSS and CCHS data across cycles to increase sample size and thus open up new avenues of research is a viable strategy.
The exception to the overall stability of coefficients in the GSS is the effect of self-rated health and working hours. In both cases, survey content preceding the life satisfaction question likely focuses respondents’ attention on specific aspects of their lives and thereby influences their answers to the life satisfaction question. When general health is asked about before life satisfaction, people reporting poor health are more likely than others to report lower levels of life satisfaction. Similarly, after respondents are asked "time crunch" questions, they appear to associate long working hours with a lower level of life satisfaction.
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