Joseph Sirgy

Culture and Well-Being: A Research Agenda Designed to Improve Cross-Cultural Research Involving the Life Satisfaction Construct

The goal of this chapter was to develop a research agenda to help quality-of-life researchers devise improved methods to measure life satisfaction in large-scale national surveys and making cross-country comparisons. Specifically, we identified six cultural dimensions that have a direct bearing on the measurement of life satisfaction. These are (1) identity (individualism vs. collectivism culture), (2) authority (high- vs. low-power distance culture), (3) competition (femininity vs. masculinity), (4) risk (high- vs. low-uncertainty avoidance), (5) time span (long-term orientation vs. short-term orientation), and (6) status (achievement vs. ascription). Theory and evidence suggest that these cultural factors tend to bias the measurement of life satisfaction in large-scale national and international surveys. As such, we developed a set of theoretical propositions to expound and explicate the cultural bias in the measurement of life satisfaction and offered a set of methodological remedies.