Don’t Look Up! Individual Income Comparisons and Subjective Well-Being of Students in Thailand

TY - JOUR

T1 - Don’t Look Up! Individual Income Comparisons and Subjective Well-Being of Students in Thailand

AU - Dufhues, Thomas

AU - Möllers, Judith

AU - Jantsch, Antje

AU - Buchenrieder, Gertrud

AU - Camfield, Laura

N1 - Funding Information: This article is a contribution to the project: ‘Perceptions of inequality through social comparisons and transference on subjective wellbeing: a micro perspective on reference groups’ funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) (BU1319/22-1, MO1763/8-1). Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).

PY - 2023/2

Y1 - 2023/2

N2 - Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that an individual’s position in an income stratum—more than the absolute income level—determines subjective well-being. However, studies on subjective well-being suffer from a critical methodological weakness: they use exogenously defined reference groups. Our study addresses this point by applying an innovative new survey instrument. We ask respondents to identify individual reference persons for income comparisons. We find that these reference persons come from a range of social groups. Interactions between personality traits and the direction of income comparisons lead to different levels of subjective well-being. This highlights the importance of collecting information on personality traits in research on subjective well-being. We conclude that questions about self-defined individual income comparisons can be a valuable and straightforward addition to future surveys.

AB - Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that an individual’s position in an income stratum—more than the absolute income level—determines subjective well-being. However, studies on subjective well-being suffer from a critical methodological weakness: they use exogenously defined reference groups. Our study addresses this point by applying an innovative new survey instrument. We ask respondents to identify individual reference persons for income comparisons. We find that these reference persons come from a range of social groups. Interactions between personality traits and the direction of income comparisons lead to different levels of subjective well-being. This highlights the importance of collecting information on personality traits in research on subjective well-being. We conclude that questions about self-defined individual income comparisons can be a valuable and straightforward addition to future surveys.

KW - Income comparisons

KW - Reference groups

KW - Subjective well-being

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85143286412&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s10902-022-00604-4

DO - 10.1007/s10902-022-00604-4

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85143286412

SN - 1389-4978

VL - 24

SP - 477

EP - 503

JO - Journal Of Happiness Studies

JF - Journal Of Happiness Studies

IS - 2

ER -