Elsevier

Public Health

Volume 128, Issue 9, September 2014, Pages 849-851
Public Health

Short Communication
Happiness and health among U.S. working adults: is the association explained by socio-economic status?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2014.06.014Get rights and content

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Approach and findings

Data from the General Social Survey (GSS) was used. The GSS is a cross-sectional, nationally-representative survey of U.S. adults. Due to complex skip patterns in the interviews, only adults in the labour force (including those working part time or temporarily laid off) were asked questions on both happiness and health (n = 3722).

Happiness was measured using the Global Happiness item: ‘Taken all together, how would you say things are these days--would you say that you are very happy, pretty

Implications of findings

It was found that happiness was strongly and consistently associated with self-rated health (SRH) among working U.S. adults. The strong associations persisted with extensive controls for socio-economic factors including education, income, and occupational prestige. The main implication of this pattern is that SES did not seem to confound the association between happiness and health in this population. Additionally, happiness explained more variance in SRH in working adults than any one of the

Ethical approval

Not required.

Funding

None declared.

Competing interests

None declared.

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