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Who’s miserable now? Identifying clusters of people with the lowest subjective wellbeing in the UK

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  • Paul Dolan

    (London School of Economics and Political Science)

  • Kate Laffan

    (London School of Economics and Political Science
    University College Dublin)

  • Alina Velias

    (University College Dublin
    University of London)

Abstract

Policymakers are generally most concerned about improving the lives of the worst-off members of society. Identifying these people can be challenging. We take various measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) as indicators of the how well people are doing in life and employ Latent Class Analysis to identify those with greatest propensity to be among the worst-off in a nationally representative sample of over 215,000 people in the United Kingdom. Our results have important implications for how best to analyse data on SWB and who to target when looking to improve the lives of those with the lowest SWB (The authors owe a massive debt of gratitude to the Office for National Statistics for their support throughout this research. We are particularly grateful to Dawn Snape and Eleanor Rees for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper, to Salah Mehad for the thorough review of methodology, and to Vahe Nafilyan for advice on clustering analysis. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for the very helpful comments. Thank you all very much.).

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Dolan & Kate Laffan & Alina Velias, 2022. "Who’s miserable now? Identifying clusters of people with the lowest subjective wellbeing in the UK," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 58(4), pages 679-710, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:58:y:2022:i:4:d:10.1007_s00355-021-01365-4
    DOI: 10.1007/s00355-021-01365-4
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