The Influencing Mechanism of Social Effort-Reward Imbalance on Life Satisfaction among Aging Workforces in the United States: A Longitudinal Study

Improving life satisfaction is consistent with the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals. Although there are many studies examining life satisfaction, research on the influencing mechanisms remains a hot topic and scholars hope to explore more aspects that improve life satisfaction. The purpose was to explore how the relationship between social effort-reward imbalance and life satisfaction are mediated by positive and negative affect. We collected longitudinal data from 909 respondents participating in the 2008 and 2012 wave of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We used the first-order difference method and structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis to evaluate the validity of the proposed hypotheses. Our results demonstrated that social effort-reward imbalance was positively related to negative affect, and negatively related to positive affect. Positive affect was positively related to life satisfaction, while negative affect was negatively related to life satisfaction. The findings also indicated that positive and negative affect completely mediated the relationship between social effort-reward imbalance and life satisfaction. This study has made a contribution to the research on the influencing mechanism of life satisfaction from the aspects of theory and practice. Longitudinal data ensured that the conclusions were more reliable so that the study could provide useful suggestions for improving life satisfaction.