Zur subjektiven Lebenszufriedenheit der Deutschen im Kontext von tagesspezifischen und regionalen Einflussfaktoren

This contribution analyses the presumption that subjective assessments of cognitive life satisfaction provide hardly any valid information about the respondent’s real quality of life, since subjective assessments are subject to short term context-events and the affective state of the respondent in the moment of answering the questionnaire. Starting from this thesis, the author uses the 50.359 participants containing dataset GlücksTREND2013 to test whether (1) the weather conditions on the interview day, (2) results of elections preceding the interview, (3) the flooding 2013 in east Germany or (4) the outcome of the Champions League finale in 2013 show effects on the stated life satisfaction of the respondents. For this purpose, the GlücksTREND is merged with information on the aforementioned events and subsequently analyzed with quasi-experimental procedures. Except for the Champions League finale, none of the events showed a significant effect in the representative assessment of subjective life satisfaction in Germany. For the Champions League finale of the 25the May it is shown that participants from Bavaria stated a significantly increased lifesatiscation on Monday after the won finale. However, this effect had already disappeared by Tuesday. Alltogehter, results are speaking against the assumption that representative surveys of subjective life-satisfaction are in a significant way distorted by context events.