Aleid Brouwer (p), Laura Dorland, George de Kam

Richard Rijnks

The quality of live, wellbeing and feelings of happiness are for a large part determined by health, family, friends and income. Studies in sociology and phycology have done much research to determine this. From a spatial viewpoint it is interesting to investigate whether or not the daily environment has an influence on these feelings of happiness. Does access or proximity to different functions and amenities have an effect on how happy vulnerable older adults feel? Older adults in the Netherlands need to age in place, even with increased levels of vulnerability. Vulnerable older adults often have decreased mobility and have a small(er) daily activity space. Therefore, there could be a relationship between closeness of amenities and functions (such as e.g. doctor’s office, supermarket, places to socially interact, and cultural amenities) and how happy people feel. In a survey under 1500 vulnerable older adults we investigate whether the daily environment, next to health, family, friends and income, have an effect on happiness.

Marcello Gelormini (p), Aleid Brouwer, Ilaria Mariotti

Heike Delfmann

See extended abstract

Richard Rijnks (p), Sierdjan Koster, Philip McCann

Marcello Gelormini

The Easterlin paradox showed that for explaining individual wellbeing, both absolute and relative income need to be taken into account. Individuals compare their income, or consumption, to that of a reference group and it is this relative income that then determines wellbeing. The reference groups commonly used in studies are too large to allow an individual to make the comparison (upwards of a hundred thousand observations in a single reference group). This paper seeks to address the question how an individual’s relative income affects self-reported well-being and at what scale. The data used for this paper is a large scale biobank survey conducted in the north of the Netherlands and includes self-reported data on topics such as health, wellbeing, socio-economic position, and changes over time. The study finds that an individual’s position relative to the neighbour affects self-reported well-being significantly. While models including comparisons at any size of bandwidth perform better than models including just absolute income, the best-performing model is at the lower end of the bandwidth sizes (100 meters). In addition, this paper finds evidence that the comparison effect is not, as previously assumed, symmetrical, but instead yields different results for people above or below the average wage in the population.