Individual Importance Weighting of Domain Satisfaction Ratings does Not Increase Validity

Collabra: Psychology

Stefan C. Schmukle¹  Julia M. Rohrer³ 

[1] International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course (LIFE), Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin;and German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), Berlin;Department of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig

关键词: well-being;    life satisfaction;    domain satisfaction;    domain importance;    weighting;   

DOI  :  10.1525/collabra.116

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: University of California Press

【 摘 要 】

Bottom-up models of life satisfaction are based on the assumption that individuals judge the overall quality of their lives by aggregating information across various life domains, such as health, family, and income. This aggregation supposedly involves a weighting procedure because individuals care about different parts of their lives to varying degrees. Thus, composite measures of well-being should be more accurate if domain satisfaction scores are weighted by the importance that respondents assign to the respective domains. Previous studies have arrived at mixed conclusions about whether such a procedure actually works. In the present study, importance weighting was investigated in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID; N = 5,049). Both weighted composite scores and moderated regression analyses converged in producing the conclusion that individual importance weights did not result in higher correlations with the outcome variable, a global measure of life satisfaction. By contrast, using weights that vary normatively across domains (e.g., assigning a larger weight to family satisfaction than to housing satisfaction for all respondents) significantly increased the correlation with global life satisfaction (although incremental validity was rather humble). These results converge with findings from other fields such as self-concept research, where evidence for individual importance weighting seems elusive as best.

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【 授权许可】

CC BY