Domain Importance in Subjective Well-Being Measures

Chang-ming Hsieh ()
Additional contact information
Chang-ming Hsieh: University of Illinois at Chicago

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2016, vol. 127, issue 2, No 15, 777-792

Abstract: Abstract In subjective well-being (SWB) studies, domain importance typically refers to the relative importance of various life domains. Although there appears to be a consensus that domain importance is an important topic, whether or not domain importance should be incorporated into measures of SWB remains contentious. Even though recent studies that examined the claims against incorporating domain importance, also known as domain importance weighting, into SWB measures found that both conceptual and empirical arguments have been far from sufficient, insufficient evidence against importance weighting does not mean there is evidence to support importance weighting. Conducting a secondary analysis, the current study investigates the role of domain importance in SWB measures without making any arbitrary assumptions regarding how domain importance weighting should function. Results of the study show that the relationship between global life satisfaction and the sum of domain satisfaction scores did not remain constant across groups of different domain importance rating patterns. The findings suggest that, when the research objective is to study variability of responses at the level of homogeneous subgroups, it is important to consider domain importance when using domain satisfaction to construct global SWB measures.

Keywords: Importance weighting; Domain weighting; Latent class analysis; Cluster analysis; Relative domain importance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-015-0977-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:127:y:2016:i:2:d:10.1007_s11205-015-0977-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-015-0977-7

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().