Interesting. All the other evidence I’ve seen suggest that committed relationships do make people happier, so I’d be interested to see how these apparently conflicting findings can be resolved.
Part of the difference could just be the focus on marriage vs. stable relationships more generally (whether married or not): I’m not sure there’s much reason to think that a marriage certificate is going to make a big difference in and of itself (or that anyone’s really claiming that it would). In fact, there’s some, albeit limited, evidence that unmarried couples are happier on average than married ones.
I’ll try to dig up references when I have a bit more time. Don’t suppose you happen to have one for the actual research behind your first link?
“All other evidence” being? I a priori doubt all the happiness research as based on silly questionnaires and naive statistics (and most other psychological research). Is there any good metaanalysis showing anything like that?
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you (in fairness, you didn’t get back to me either!). A good paper (though not a meta-analysis) on this is:
Stutzer and Frey (2006) Does Marriage Make People Happy or Do Happy People Get Married? Journal of Socio-Economics 35:326-347. links
The lit review surveys some of the other evidence.
I a priori doubt all the happiness research as based on silly questionnaires and naive statistics
I’m a little puzzled by this comment given that the first link you provided looks (on its face) to be based on exactly this sort of evidence. But in any event, many of the studies mentioned in the Stutzer and Frey paper look at health and other outcomes as well.
By doubt I just mean it’s really really easy to get it spectacularly wrong in a systemic way in too many ways, so I’m only going to believe the result if it’s robust with wide variety of tests and situations. Not that there’s no value in it.
Fair enough. My impression of the SWB literature is that the relationship is robust, both in a purely correlational sense, and in papers like the Frey and Stutzer one where they try to control for confounding factors like personality and selection. The only major catch is how long it takes individuals to adapt after the initial SWB spike.
Indeed, having now managed to track down the paper behind your first link, it seems like this is actually their main point. From their conclusion:
Our results show that (a) selection effects appear to make happy people more likely to get and stay married, and these selection effects are at least partially [emphasis mine] responsible for the widely documented association between marital status and SWB; (b) on average, people adapt quickly and completely to marriage, and they adapt more slowly to widowhood (though even in this case, adaptation is close to complete after about 8 years); (c) there are substantial individual differences in the extent to which people adapt; and (d) the extent to which people adapt is strongly related to the degree to which they react to the initial event—those individuals who reacted strongly were still far from baseline levels years after the event. These last two findings indicate that marital transitions can be related to changes in satisfaction but that these effects may be overlooked if only average trends are examined.
Interesting. All the other evidence I’ve seen suggest that committed relationships do make people happier, so I’d be interested to see how these apparently conflicting findings can be resolved.
Part of the difference could just be the focus on marriage vs. stable relationships more generally (whether married or not): I’m not sure there’s much reason to think that a marriage certificate is going to make a big difference in and of itself (or that anyone’s really claiming that it would). In fact, there’s some, albeit limited, evidence that unmarried couples are happier on average than married ones.
I’ll try to dig up references when I have a bit more time. Don’t suppose you happen to have one for the actual research behind your first link?
“All other evidence” being? I a priori doubt all the happiness research as based on silly questionnaires and naive statistics (and most other psychological research). Is there any good metaanalysis showing anything like that?
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you (in fairness, you didn’t get back to me either!). A good paper (though not a meta-analysis) on this is:
Stutzer and Frey (2006) Does Marriage Make People Happy or Do Happy People Get Married? Journal of Socio-Economics 35:326-347. links
The lit review surveys some of the other evidence.
I’m a little puzzled by this comment given that the first link you provided looks (on its face) to be based on exactly this sort of evidence. But in any event, many of the studies mentioned in the Stutzer and Frey paper look at health and other outcomes as well.
Thanks.
By doubt I just mean it’s really really easy to get it spectacularly wrong in a systemic way in too many ways, so I’m only going to believe the result if it’s robust with wide variety of tests and situations. Not that there’s no value in it.
Fair enough. My impression of the SWB literature is that the relationship is robust, both in a purely correlational sense, and in papers like the Frey and Stutzer one where they try to control for confounding factors like personality and selection. The only major catch is how long it takes individuals to adapt after the initial SWB spike.
Indeed, having now managed to track down the paper behind your first link, it seems like this is actually their main point. From their conclusion: