Do National Service Programs Improve Subjective Well-Being in Communities?

Since the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in 1964 and AmeriCorps in 1993, a stated goal of national service programs has been to strengthen the overall health of communities across the United States. But whether national service programs have such community effects remains an open question. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel and change-score models from 2005 to 2013, this study explores whether communities with national service programs exhibit greater subjective well-being. We use novel measures of subjective well-being derived from tweeted expressions of emotions, engagement, and relationships in 1,347 U.S. counties. Results show that national service programs improve subjective well-being primarily by mitigating threats to well-being and communities that exhibit more engagement are better able to attract national service programs. Although limited in size, these persistent effects are robust to multiple threats to inference and provide important new evidence on how national service improves communities in the United States.

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Self-Related and Other-Related Pathways to Subjective Well-Being in Japan and the United States

Journal of Happiness Studies ◽

10.1007/s10902-013-9460-9 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 15 (5) ◽

pp. 995-1014 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Sheida Novin ◽

Ivy F. Tso ◽

Sara H. Konrath

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Well Being ◽

The United States ◽

Subjective Well Being

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Individual-Level Determinants of Employee Shirking

Relations industrielles ◽

10.7202/051112ar ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 51 (3) ◽

pp. 468-487 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Timothy A. Judge ◽

Timothy D. Chandler

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Job Satisfaction ◽

Health Care ◽

Work Group ◽

Well Being ◽

The United States ◽

Subjective Well Being ◽

Negative Effects ◽

Individual Level ◽

Organization Level

Employee shirking, where workers give less than full effort on the job, has typically been investigated as a construct subject to organization-level influences. Neglected are individual differences that could explain why employees in the same organization or work-group might shirk. Using a sample of workers from the health care profession in the United States, the present study sought to address these limitations by investigating subjective well-being (a dispositional construct), job satisfaction, as well as other indiuidual-level determinants of shirking. Results indicate that whites shirk significantly more than nonwhites, and that subjective well-being, job satisfaction, and age have significant, negative effects on shirking. The implications of these results are discussed.

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Endogenous Selection Bias and Cumulative Inequality over the Life Course: Evidence from Educational Inequality in Subjective Well-Being

European Sociological Review ◽

10.1093/esr/jcaa003 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 36 (3) ◽

pp. 333-350

Author(s):

Fabian Kratz ◽

Alexander Patzina

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Panel Data ◽

Life Course ◽

Panel Study ◽

Well Being ◽

The United States ◽

Subjective Well Being ◽

Interviewer Effects ◽

Endogenous Selection ◽

The Life Course

Abstract According to theories of cumulative (dis-)advantage, inequality increases over the life course. Labour market research has seized this argument to explain the increasing economic inequality as people age. However, evidence for cumulative (dis-)advantage in subjective well-being remains ambiguous, and a prominent study from the United States has reported contradictory results. Here, we reconcile research on inequality in subjective well-being with theories of cumulative (dis-)advantage. We argue that the age-specific endogenous selection of the (survey) population results in decreasing inequalities in subjective well-being means whereas individual-level changes show a pattern of cumulative (dis-)advantage. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the European Social Survey (N = 15,252) and employing hierarchical age-period-cohort models, we replicate the finding of decreasing inequality from the United States with the same research design for Germany. Using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (persons = 47,683, person-years = 360,306) and employing growth curve models, we show that this pattern of decreasing inequality in subjective well-being means is accompanied by increasing inequality in intra-individual subjective well-being changes. This pattern arises because disadvantaged groups, such as the low educated and individuals with low subjective well-being show lower probabilities of continuing to participate in a survey and because both determinants reinforce each other. In addition to allowing individual changes and attrition processes to be examined, the employed multi-cohort panel data have further key advantages for examining inequality in subjective well-being over the life course: They require weaker assumptions to control for period and cohort effects and make it possible to control for interviewer effects that may influence the results.

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