Determinants of Personal Wellbeing across Ethnic Groups in the UK : accounting for demographic, socioeconomic, health and contextual factors

Measures of wellbeing and happiness of people across nations and globally have been criticised due to their perceived inadequacy in explaining better quality of life and reduction in inequalities as economic output and income have grown. In the UK, to measure national wellbeing four questions about personal wellbeing added to the ONS Annual Population Survey (and now the Labour Force Survey). The four dimensions covered were: happiness, satisfaction with life, worthwhileness of their activity, and anxiety. Respondents were asked to answer these questions using a scale of 0 to 10. The paper, based on first three years of wellbeing data for 2011-12, 2012-13 and 2013-14, examines the relationships between the four personal wellbeing scores and other measures of economic activity and health across people from different ethnic and cultural groups. Using the Secure Data Service versions of these datasets, the paper further explores relationships between these wellbeing variables and neighbourhood deprivation, taking into account the geographical concentration of individual ethnic groups. The paper presents a series of multivariate models which adjust for the effects of demographic (age, gender), social (marital status, education completion age, religion), health (chronic condition, disability, limits activity, health status, smoking), SES (highest education, employment type, occupation, job type, public/private, weekly pay, home ownership, benefits), and contextual (deprivation, years of residence, year of in-migration, geographical region) characteristics of respondents. The findings will improve our understanding of how people from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds perceive and report their well-being and happiness.