Browsing by Author "Kocimska‑Bortnowska, A."

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    Introduction to a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Well‑Being: Combining Life Satisfaction and Interdependent Happiness Across 49 Diferent Cultures
    (Journal of Happiness Studies, 2022) Akotia, C.S.; Krys, K.; Haas, B.W.; Igou, E.R.; Kosiarczyk, A.; Kocimska‑Bortnowska, A.
    How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when well-being is being measured according to the way people in country A think about well-being? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and inter-dependent happiness focusing on individual and family, collected mostly from students, across forty-nine countries. We demonstrate that the relative idealization of the two types of well-being varies across cultural contexts and are associated with culturally different models of selfhood. Furthermore, we show that rankings of societal well-being based on life satisfaction tend to underestimate the contribution from interdependent happiness. We introduce a new culturally sensitive method for calculating societal well-being, and examine its construct validity by testing for associations with the experience of emotions and with individualism-collectivism. This new culturally sensitive approach represents a slight, yet important improvement in measuring well-being.