Luca Corazzini (Università di Messina) on "Unpacking the Determinants of Life Satisfaction: A Survey Experiment"

Speaker:  Luca Corazzini - Università di Messina
  Wednesday, April 22, 2015 at 12:30 PM Aula Menegazzi, Palazzo di Economia
We present results of a survey experiment aimed at assessing con-
text effects on subjects' reported life satisfaction, exerted by raising
awareness of fundamental life domains - income, family, job, friends,
sentimental relationships and health - through questionnaire manipu-
lations. While simply presenting subjects with the list of the domains
before evaluating overall life satisfaction has no effect on the distribu-
tion of life satisfaction, asking subjects to report their satisfaction with
each life domain strongly affects overall evaluations. In particular, we
detect a robust unpacking effect, whereby reporting satisfaction with
life domains significantly increases the subsequent overall life satisfac-
tion evaluations. In addition, raising awareness of life domains signif-
icantly increases precision (as it reduces the dispersion of responses)
and accuracy (by increasing the association between life satisfaction
and life domain evaluations) of self-reported levels of life satisfaction.
Title Format  (Language, Size, Publication date)
Paper  pdfpdf (it, 239 KB, 08/04/15)

Programme Director
Filippo Pavesi

External reference
Luca Zarri

Publication date
February 2, 2015

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