Subjective well-being in Europe: a multidimensional statistical analysis of ESS data

Subjective well-being refers to people's own evaluations of their lives, evaluations that are both affective and cognitive where the affective part is better known as happiness and the cognitive as life satisfaction. Many studies have been conducted to discover the determinants of well-being and most of them have outlined the importance of household's income. Nevertheless, the relationship between income and SWB is not so simple and many other factors can intervene. In this study, the main source of the data analysed is ESS, a large multi-country survey, which has as the main scope to evaluate social characteristics of European citizens. We attempted to discover the most important social factors that influence two determinants of SWB, happiness and life satisfaction and whether these determinants have the same impact on other variables. For the analysis of the data a method from the multidimensional field is applied, correspondence analysis. The final results extracted, seem to prove an interaction of life satisfaction and happiness with most variables of the study and it was deduced that income has not the most powerful interdependence with SWB.