Does Weather Really Influence the Measurement of Life Satisfaction?

Claudia Schmiedeberg and Jette Schröder ()

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2014, vol. 117, issue 2, 387-399

Abstract: Since the beginning of the nineties, a number of studies indicate that weather conditions at interview day can have an effect on measurement, in particular regarding life satisfaction. In their seminal paper, Schwarz and Clore (J Pers Soc Psychol 45(3):513–523, 1983 ) show higher reported life satisfaction for sunny days, a finding which is replicated recently by Kämpfer and Mutz (Soc Indic Res 110(2):579–595, 2013 ). However, both studies are based on relatively small samples (from a few dozen up to 200 cases). We use data of the German Family Panel (pairfam) and local weather data for every respondent to investigate if weather effects on satisfaction measurement can be replicated with a large sample (about 7,000 respondents). In addition to cross-sectional analyses in which we follow closely the approach of Kämpfer and Mutz, we estimate fixed effects regressions to model the effect of weather on individual changes in satisfaction over time. We do neither find an effect of nice weather on the day of the interview on the respondents’ ratings of general life satisfaction nor a consistent effect on any of the other satisfaction measures. These results show that at least with simple weather measures as they have been used as yet a relationship between weather conditions at interview day and answering behavior regarding life satisfaction cannot be found. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Life satisfaction; Mood; Weather; Sunshine; Measurement error (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11205-013-0350-7 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:117:y:2014:i:2:p:387-399

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-013-0350-7

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 ().