Family constellations and life satisfaction in Europe

Silvana Salvini, University of Florence
Elena Pirani, University of Florence
Daniele Vignoli, University of Florence

Empirical research on life satisfaction and its determinants has a long history, but beside the traditional demographic and socio-economic aspects, research findings on the relationship between family status and life satisfaction in Europe are rather scarce. Nevertheless, European countries have recently witnessed remarkable changes in family formation, dissolution and reconstitution processes. It is trivial to imagine that these family changes should have necessarily influenced peoples’ satisfaction with life. In this research we aim at filling this knowledge-gap testing the impact of different types of family living arrangements on life satisfaction, applying an ordinal multilevel regression model. Data used come from the Second European Quality of Live Survey, comprising the 15 original members, the 12 new members and the 3 candidate countries. This modeling allows for explicitly account for the country context (in terms of family policy-regime, labor market structures, gender norms) in the relationship between living arrangement and life satisfaction.