Critical events configurations shape wellbeing throughout life
WELLWAYS Critical events and transitions in family and work and multidimensional wellbeing
Stressful life events like the birth of a child, divorce, or the loss of a job can have a significant impact on individual wellbeing, and the effect may be magnified if several occur in a relatively short period of time. Researchers in the Wellways project aim to build a deeper picture of how these major life events affect wellbeing, as Professor Laura Bernardi explains. An individual’s wellbeing
tends to vary over time, and is greatly affected by life events like marriage, the birth of a child or bereavement. Based at the University of Lausanne, Professor Laura Bernardi is analysing data from both Switzerland and France as part of the Wellways project, aiming to build a deeper picture of how wellbeing fluctuates over the course of our lifespan, and of the factors that influence it. “For Switzerland, we’re using data gathered from the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), a longitudinal survey that was established in 1999. There are always new household cohorts coming into the survey, and we can follow people over long periods of time,” she explains “For France, we draw on two other panels, the epidemiological cohort Constances with a sample of 200,000 adults, and the Health and Professional Trajectories (SIP) collected in two waves of 2006 and 2010,” continues Professor Bernardi.
Wellways project The aim now is to use the data from these surveys to explore the relationship between major life events and different dimensions of wellbeing over the course of the average lifespan. Typically, wellbeing, when measured as how satisfied a person is with life in general, follows a U-shaped curve; young people report high wellbeing, middle aged individuals report lower wellbeing, whereas wellbeing is again higher among older people, which might seem paradoxical. “Generally, health
deteriorates as we age, and there are lots of other reasons why we would be less satisfied as we grow older,” says Professor Bernardi. The project will probe deeper into the questions around how wellbeing evolves as people age, while Professor Bernardi and her colleagues will also investigate the impact of work and family life on wellbeing. “The SHP has data on family history, on employment, and it follows people over these domains, while the French surveys provide more detail on health indicators,” she outlines. “We take a baseline level of happiness or wellbeing and investigate the impact of different life events.”
labour market exit, or upward- and downward mobility, and are looking at the cumulative impact of these stressful events on individual wellbeing. “Is there a threshold beyond which you cannot overcome that stress, a kind of vulnerability limit? And does it matter whether events occur in both the work and family domain?” asks Professor Bernardi. “Maybe if an individual has to deal with three or four stressful events, they get a bit down, but then recuperate and recover. But if they have to deal with seven of them and from different domains, then it may be more difficult to recover. Then it’s a cumulative disadvantage.”
If an individual has to deal with two or three stressful events, most will recuperate and recover. But if they have to deal with many more, in different life domains, it may be more difficult to recover.
When the number of events is higher or several events occur in a short period of time, we observe that the life satisfaction curve goes down. The life events examined in Wellways are fairly common and related to work or family, which can have positive or negative effects on wellbeing. One major event of interest in the project is the birth of a child, while researchers are also looking at the impact of less happy events. “We also consider union disruption, so separations or divorce, as well as the death of a relative or partner,” says Professor Bernardi. Researchers are also considering the effects of changes in people’s working lives, such as
The timespan over which these events occur may also affect an individual’s wellbeing, an issue Professor Bernardi plans to investigate. The starting point here is to look at positive and negative events over the course of a year, and then to assess whether these events have a stronger impact on wellbeing if they are concentrated in a short period of time. “We have seen that on average people experience about 10 critical events in their adult life (between 20 and 50 years old), mostly related to health, family,
Project Objectives
Fig 1: Life satisfaction follows a U-shaped curve: young adults and the elderly report higher wellbeing than mid-aged individuals.
work and residential trajectories. When the number of events is higher or several events occur in a short period of time, we also observe that the life satisfaction curve goes down” explains Professor Bernardi. This suggests that what affects wellbeing is particularly the combination and concentration of events, and if they occur in a short period of time it can make it difficult to cope. “This is why, when you use cross-sectional data on wellbeing, we see that it is the middle years of life that are difficult, given that this is often the rush hour of life, when many things happen in multiple life domains” says Professor Bernardi. This is often a point in life at which many events occur and pressures accumulate, for example taking care of elderly parents or coping with bereavement while at the same time raising a family and holding down a job. The wider social and economic picture also affects individual wellbeing, something Professor Bernardi is taking into account in the project. “We include a control for a given period where a recession occurs,” she says. The impact of a recession tends not to be uniform however, and those who were in more precarious employment to start with are likely to be more severely affected than those who are more established. In addition, data on people’s personality traits have been recorded in the SHP, another area of interest to Professor Bernardi. “It will be interesting in the near future to look at whether the impact of these period effects vary according to these psychological characteristics,” she continues.
Fig 2: When individuals experience several events concentrated in a short time window life satisfaction is lower than when individuals experience fewer or more spread events.
Wider comparisons The project’s research is centered on Switzerland and France, but in the future Professor Bernardi intends to widen the comparative context and look at data from other countries with different approaches to social security. The thresholds may be very different in the US for example, where there is relatively limited social security, or in the Scandinavian countries where there is more in comparison to Switzerland or France. “The aim would be to see whether we can generalise about threshold effects, and to look at how the context can affect those thresholds,” says Professor Bernardi. While this work can be thought of as fundamental research, it also holds wider relevance in terms of public policy. “If we see that specific events and specific combinations of events lead to a nonrecoverable pattern in terms of wellbeing, then I think that would be of interest for policy-makers. They could then look to try and counteract that,” outlines Professor Bernardi. Researchers are not yet at a point where they can draw firm conclusions however, and they are still working on several papers for various different journals. The initial results of the project’s research indicate that experiencing more than three critical life events in a short period of time can have a dramatic impact on wellbeing, and Professor Bernardi hopes to publish some more results by the end of this year.
WELLWAYS aims to analyse, using longitudinal data from Switzerland and France, how work and family trajectories jointly affect wellbeing. The overall objective of the project is to understand the risks of a deterioration of wellbeing throughout the course of life, by taking a dynamic approach to the life course and a multidimensional approach to wellbeing. The aim will be to analyse the role of individual resources in preventing the risks or limiting their impact.
Project Funding
Duration: 01.02.2019 - 31.05.2021 Funding source : Project funding in humanities and social sciences (Division I: CHF 464’558)
Project Participants
• Please see website for details
Contact Details
Laura Bernardi Professor of Life Course Demography and Sociology Member of the SNSF Research Council Editor-in-Chief (co) of Advances in Life Course Research University of Lausanne Géopolis Building 1015 Lausanne T: +41-21-692-3846 E: laura.bernardi@unil.ch W: https://applicationspub.unil.ch/ interpub/noauth/php/Un/UnPers. php?PerNum=1071358&LanCode=37 Comolli, C., L, Bernardi, L. and Voorpostel, M. (submitted to EJP May 2020). Joint family and work trajectories and multidimensional wellbeing. Comolli, C., L, Bernardi, L. and Voorpostel, M. (submitted to SSM, June 2020) Multidimensional wellbeing over the life course. Barbuscia, A. and Comolli, C.L. (submitted to Vienna Yearbook, May 2020). Gender and socioeconomic health and wellbeing inequalities across age in France and Switzerland.
Professor Laura Bernardi
Laura Bernardi is Professor of Demography and Sociology of the life course at the University of Lausanne and member of the Swiss National Research Council. She is also Editor of the journal Advances in Life Course Research. Her current research is about family and migration and led several research projects in these areas. She is widely published in several international high rank journals in demography and sociology and edited a handful of collective volumes by Springer.
Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash
10
EU Research
www.euresearcher.com
11