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Happiness, Post-materialist Values, and the Unmarried

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Abstract

With the rise of individualism and post-materialist values comes the fall in the importance of marriage. However, it is still not clear how these two processes affect each other in terms of individuals’ wellbeing and happiness. Thus, the aim of this paper is to gain a better understanding of how happiness may be moderated by post-materialist values among different groups of marital status: never married, divorced/separated, widowed, married, and cohabiting individuals. Through executing a multilevel analysis on data from the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2014, this paper demonstrates a clear relationship between post-materialist values and levels of happiness. Moreover, it is shown that holding post-materialist views provides greater levels of happiness for singles than it does for cohabiters and married individuals, raising questions about the relationship between marriage and happiness in a post-materialist era.

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  1. The Federmann School of Public Policy and Government, The Hebrew University, Campus Mount Scopus, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel

    Elyakim Kislev

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Table 4 Mean of post-materialist values and percentages of marital status by country, age 30 and above
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Kislev, E. Happiness, Post-materialist Values, and the Unmarried. J Happiness Stud 19, 2243–2265 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9921-7

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