Is more better? Relationship between education and life satisfaction using a comparative perspective
Open Access
- Author:
- Ahn, Jeebin
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Theory and Policy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- September 30, 2020
- Committee Members:
- David Post, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
David Post, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Maithreyi Gopalan, Committee Member
Marsha Elizabeth Modeste, Committee Member
Pui-Wa Lei, Outside Member
Kevin Kinser, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- education
life satisfaction
positional good
World Values Survey
happiness
subjective well-being - Abstract:
- Does more education always lead people to be more satisfied in life? The existing research has yielded inconclusive answer to this question. While some studies have reported a positive relationship between education and life satisfaction, there are other studies which have found no significant relationship or even a negative relationship between the two. This dissertation aims to contribute to the existing literature by adding empirical evidence on the relationship between education and life satisfaction (LS). The current study explores whether education might have a positive or negative effect on LS. First, it examines whether education, in its relation to life satisfaction, is an “absolute” or a “positional” good. If education is a positional good, the value of holding a certain level of education would come from its scarcity and the advantage it gives over other people with less prestigious degrees. Therefore, from the positional perspective, the relationship between a certain level of education and life satisfaction will vary by how much the given level of education is shared among population. On the contrary, if education is an absolute good, having more education would always be linked to greater life satisfaction for individuals no matter how much it is shared among population. Specifically, this study addresses the following three research questions: (1) To what extent is education associated with people’s life satisfaction around the world? (2) How does the association between education and life satisfaction differ across countries? (3) What may explain cross-national difference in the relation between education and life satisfaction? Does the percentage of population with a certain level of education moderate the relationship between the given level of education and life satisfaction at individual level? Using the 6th wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), the present study found that having more education is associated with greater life satisfaction around the world, when levels of education were the only independent variable. When other control variables were controlled, secondary education had a negative and tertiary education had an insignificant relationship with LS. Also, regression analyses revealed cross-national variations in the relationship between education and life satisfaction. Education, when estimated as the only independent variable in the model, had a positive association in most countries. However, when other contributions were controlled for, regression coefficients of education remained positive only in a few countries. Coefficients of education lost statistical significance in most countries and they even turned negative in some countries. Finally, the findings of the third research question show the possibility that education, in its relation to life satisfaction, might work as a positional good. I found that interaction terms for the percentage of population with a certain level of education and individual’s level of education were statistically significant. This indicates that the effect of having a particular level of education on life satisfaction was moderated by how much the given level of education was shared among population. The current study aims to contribute to the existing literature in several ways. First, as mentioned above, it adds additional evidence on the relationship between education and life satisfaction by applying a positional perspective for investigation. Second, the present study includes a broader age range in the analysis instead of focusing on specific age group in order to provide an opportunity to understand how education affects life satisfaction from a more comprehensive point of view. Finally, using a large-scale international dataset collected from multiple countries, this study expands the existing comparative research on the relationship between education and life satisfaction.