Social demographic and personality factors related to woman’s subjective well-being

Abstract

The relationships between woman’s subjective well-being (SWB), personality traits and sociodemographic factors were explored in the resent study. A sample of Lithuanian women (N=308), age range from 40 to 46, (M=42,4) participated in this study. The results indicate that comparing women in educational level and personal income, large differences were found between categories in these variables. An examination of the joint contribution to explain life satisfaction by the different social demographic variables indicated that the strongest predictors for women's SWB were education and income. The results indicated that married/cohabiting women are indeed more satisfied with their lives than non-married persons. Marital status was even stronger predictor of SWB for participants when considered jointly with other factors. One unexpected finding is that high education and high income became almost non-significant predictors of life satisfaction in our sample when personality variables were added as predictors. Subjective health and especially satisfaction with leisure emerged as important determinants of SWB. However, when personality variables were entered, subjective health became weak predictor of SWB. Overall, our findings indicate that there are substantial SWB mean level differences in relation to social demographic variables.