Happy Families: types, ties and multidimensional wellbeing

The literature has already highlighted the positive role of marriage on objective wellbeing. Indeed, married couples earn more, are less likely to be unemployed, live longer and healthier lives, and so on. Married couples also show higher levels of subjective wellbeing, as revealed in several happiness studies. These previous studies typically offer a single, often generic measure of happiness. The novel contribution of this paper is to offer a more comprehensive perspective of various dimensions of subjective wellbeing. The hypothesis under analysis concerns whether, and if so, how different family types (single, cohabiting, married) and stronger family ties (defined by the presence of children and religious observance) impact the dimensions of subjective wellbeing (satisfaction with economic resources, health, relations, leisure and labour) using Italian data between 2000 and 2015. Our findings shows that married subjects display a consistently higher probability of being satisfied with health, relationships among family and friends, whereas those defined as single display a higher probability of being satisfied with leisure time and to a lesser extent with their work. Finally, married couples also show a higher probability of being satisfied with their economic resources.