Social Comparisons Under Pandemic Stress: Income Reference Groups, Comparison Patterns, and the Subjective Well-Being of German Students

Antje Jantsch, Gertrud Buchenrieder, neé Schrieder, Thomas Dufhues and Judith Möllers
Additional contact information
Judith Möllers: Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), External Environment for Agriculture and Policy Analysis

Journal of Happiness Studies, 2024, vol. 25, issue 7, No 1, 24 pages

Abstract: Abstract People use social comparisons to reduce uncertainty when facing new or stressful situations. This study explores how a stressful experience, the COVID-19 pandemic, changed how people compare their income. It relates these changes to subjective well-being (SWB). We use a repeated cross-sectional dataset of students at two German universities from before and during the pandemic. A novel survey instrument is employed to identify individualized reference groups used for income comparison and to analyze whether the comparison pattern changed. Our results reveal that, while there was little change in the size of the reference groups, there was some difference in the group composition. During the pandemic, survey respondents were more likely to select two types of individuals into their reference groups: relatives and people they only knew from social media. Income comparisons were beginning to have a negative association with SWB, while the relation had been positive before the pandemic. Moreover, upward income comparisons increased.

Keywords: COVID-19; Pandemic; Reference group; Comparison pattern; Subjective well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10902-024-00790-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Journal Article: Social Comparisons Under Pandemic Stress: Income Reference Groups, Comparison Patterns, and the Subjective Well-Being of German Students (2024)
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:jhappi:v:25:y:2024:i:7:d:10.1007_s10902-024-00790-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... fe/journal/10902/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10902-024-00790-3

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Happiness Studies is currently edited by Antonella Delle Fave

More articles in Journal of Happiness Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().