Introduction to a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Well-Being: Combining Life Satisfaction and Interdependent Happiness Across 49 Different Cultures

Introduction to a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Well-Being: Combining Life Satisfaction and Interdependent Happiness Across 49 Different Cultures. Kuba Krys et al. Journal of Happiness Studies, Dec 26 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-022-00588-1

Abstract: How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when well-being is being measured according to the way people in country A think about well-being? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and interdependent happiness focusing on individual and family, collected mostly from students, across forty-nine countries. We demonstrate that the relative idealization of the two types of well-being varies across cultural contexts and are associated with culturally different models of selfhood. Furthermore, we show that rankings of societal well-being based on life satisfaction tend to underestimate the contribution from interdependent happiness. We introduce a new culturally sensitive method for calculating societal well-being, and examine its construct validity by testing for associations with the experience of emotions and with individualism-collectivism. This new culturally sensitive approach represents a slight, yet important improvement in measuring well-being.

Discussion

We developed a new approach to measure levels of well-being across diverse cultural contexts. We designed a new culturally sensitive approach to measuring well-being along two dimensions based on mounting empirical evidence that cultures vary in the way well-being and/or happiness is valued and construed. Cultures vary in relative focus on the individual versus the family (Delle Fave et al., 2016; Krys et al., 2019b, 2022a), and in construing well-being using an individual-focused life satisfaction framework versus an interdependent conceptual framework (Hitokoto & Uchida, 2015; Krys et al., 2020). Accordingly, our new, culturally sensitive approach adjusts individual-level well-being scores according to the particular type of well-being that tends to be valued within a respondent’s indigenous culture. This new approach represents an incremental improvement to the array of methods available to researchers seeking to measure, describe, and compare levels of well-being across the world.

It is important to note that, empirically, the CS approach is not substantially different from the vast array of other well established quantitative measures of well-being. Indeed, our new CS measure of well-being is explicitly comprised of several thoroughly tested and well validated measures of well-being. Each of the measures used to calculate CS Well-being, as well as many others, has been shown to be highly reliable and valid across many different cultural contexts. We acknowledge that the current status quo of empirical research on well-being is highly valid, credible, and valuable. Empirically, the advent of the CS approach represents a slight, yet important, improvement in the fidelity of well-being measurement.

The CS approach represents a substantial improvement with respect to other measures when considered conceptually. The vast majority of existing evidence for differences in country-level well-being was derived based on the use of identical measures across diverse cultural contexts (Cheng et al., 2016; Diener et al., 1995; Hofstede, 2001; Jasielska et al., 2018; Kuppens et al., 2008; Steel et al., 2018). Well-being research is a subfield within psychological science that is in need of tools that are more applicable across diverse cultural contexts. Many large scale studies show that an overwhelming majority of empirical psychological research is based on WEIRD samples (Adams et al., 2017; cf. Lee et al., 2021). For example, an analysis of the top journals across six sub-disciplines of psychology found that 68% of participants were American and that 96% of participants were from Western industrialized nations (Arnett, 2008). The development of the CS approach to measure well-being is a marked, incremental step towards conceptualizing psychological phenomena less ethnocentrically.

The CS approach involves the use of several different previously established and well-validated measures. Although all the measures used in our study have been shown to be valid and reliable across several different cultural contexts, there also exists evidence that different well-being measures (including the IH) do not perform in the same way across different cultural contexts. Recently Gardiner et al. (2020) found that well-being measures tend to perform better when they are used within the culture in which they were developed. This finding further supports the importance and potential utility of using culturally sensitive measures of well-being for large-scale cross-cultural research.

We found that individual LS, as measured by the SWLS, is positively associated with country-level values of individualism. This finding is consistent with prior reports that LS tends to covary with societal levels of individualism (Cheng et al., 2016; Diener et al., 1995; Hofstede, 2001; Kuppens et al., 2008; Steel et al., 2018). Conversely, we did not observe that CS well-being was associated with societal levels of individualism. We did however find that across both types of well-being measures, country level values of de-contextualized versus contextualized self, were positively associated with happiness. De-contextualized versus contextualized self represents how much a person thinks about their identity within the context of others (e.g., Someone could understand who you are without needing to know which social groups you belong to vs If someone wants to understand who you are, they would need to know which social groups you belong to). Prior research demonstrates that contextualism is an important facet of cultural collectivism (Owe et al., 2013). Our current findings suggest the de-contextualism may also confer some societal characteristics linked to well-being measured in several different ways.

We also found that both methods of measuring well-being tended to be associated with the experience of positive and negative emotions (r = -0.215). This finding supports the construct validity of CS Well-being and contributes to a growing body of research demonstrating the link between emotional experience and life satisfaction (Kang et al., 2003; Kuppens et al., 2008). Across our sample, we also found that the association between CS Well-being and positive emotions (r = 0.455) were stronger than between well-being and negative emotions (r = −0.215). This finding is consistent with that of a previous study showing that the experience of positive emotions is more strongly related to life satisfaction than the absence of negative emotions (Kuppens et al., 2008). Emotional experience seems to play an important role in determining many different forms well-being, that include happiness and LS.

This study and the CS approach are limited in several important ways. We focused on only two different types of well-being originating from WEIRD and Confucian cultural contexts: LS and IH. There exist other forms of well-being and/or happiness that are applicable to people of other cultures. For example, spirituality is strongly associated with well-being in Africa and Latin America (Selman et al., 2013), and dispositional simpatico (emphasis on expressive displays of personal charm, graciousness, and hospitality) is an important part of well-being and happiness within many Latin-American cultures (Sanchez-Burks et al., 2000). This study is also limited in terms of the way participants responded to each scale. More specifically, being asked about one’s individual life-satisfaction may indirectly affect the way one responds to items related to interdependent happiness of one’s family. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether our instructions to think about ideal levels of well-being (Diener et al., 2000) activated the ideal self or the ought self (Higgins, 1987); future studies may need to employ more direct instruction. In addition, this study is limited in the way culture was operationalized. In our analyses, we equated culture with country. However there exists considerable heterogeneity of cultural values within countries, which we did not consider here. These issues need further empirical research to uncover their potential effects.

Furthermore, we conceptualized well-being more in terms of feeling good than functioning well or one’s sense of meaning. One’s sense of meaning is often construed as an important factor related to happiness and well-being in many different parts of the world (Costin & Vignoles, 2020; Oishi & Diener, 2014). The fact that these other aspects of well-being and/or happiness were not included in the current study is an important limitation. We anticipate that future research will consider how these other forms of well-being and/or happiness can be incorporated into global and cross-cultural studies on well-being. Furthermore, future research is needed based on more representative samples. Our study was based primarily on student samples and serves as one step towards developing more culturally sensitive indices of well-being. Lastly, this study was also limited in that measures individualism-collectivism were obtained from country-level databases and not measured directly in this study. By adding data from different databases, assessed on national level, an additional level of ambiguity was created. We anticipate that this study will stimulate further empirical research on culturally sensitive methods of measuring many different psychological constructs.

The above limitations and future directions are of “technical” nature. However, it is also important to highlight other broad and conceptual issues. For example, as of the beginning of 2000s, most people and most nations tend to report being happy or very happy (e.g., Oishi et al., 2007). Despite this fact, policy-makers and scientists are striving to develop ways to enhance happiness. We affirm that happiness of many people and many nations can be enhanced, but in our understanding, well-being is not completely interchangeable with happiness. What other-than-happiness constructs people across cultures recognize as key components to their good life, and what are their ideal levels, is currently an important but open empirical question.

The results of this study have practical implications. This tool holds potential to examine the way several other culture-level variables, such as cultural tightness-looseness (Gelfand et al., 2011) or relational mobility (Thomson et al., 2018), may correspond to variation in well-being. Furthermore, our findings illustrate the importance of considering how much a particular construct is valued within a context, and that this approach could be applied to other psychological phenomenon. For example, cultures vary in terms of what types of social policies are valued and prioritized (Krys et al., 2022b). Thus, by incorporating what types of societal goals a culture or country tends to have, policy makers may be better positioned to measure how proximate or distal actual realization of culture-specific goals are.

People around the world want to be happy. Therefore, more and more governing bodies employ well-being as a compass for guiding their societies (Durand, 2018). To escape post-colonial traps in well-being indicators research and in policy-making, researchers and international governing bodies may need to acknowledge that happiness across cultures has various facets. Doing so will promote “buy-in” from many non-WEIRD societies. Large-scale cross-cultural research on well-being will be improved by considering more culturally sensitive measures of well-being. We hope this study serves as one small step forward inspiring this research focus.