Angela Leite, Anna Costa, Paolo Dias and Ruut Veenhoven
Accepted for publication in Hilke BrockMann & Roger Fernandez-Urbano. (Eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life, to be Published by Edgar in 2024
Education provides individuals with a set of skills that are assumed to allow them to have better lives and, ultimately, be happier. The fact that higher levels of education are associated with better living conditions might lead to the assumption that education as such is related to higher levels of happiness. However, this relationship is not clearly established in the literature. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the existing evidence on the relationship between education and happiness to inform the discussion of the past, present, and future of the field. For this purpose, two studies were conducted, one at the microlevel of individuals and the other at the macrolevel of nations, using a quantitative approach based on findings from the archive of the World Database of Happiness (WDoH; https://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl/). In Study 1, at the microlevel of analysis, the link between individuals’ years of schooling and educational level and happiness is explored. The analysis of 86 correlational findings shows a small average zero-order correlation (r = +0.09) and much variation (SD = 0.13). This small correlation is wiped away in multivariate analyses that control possible spurious variables, such as income; the average partial correlation is zero. In Study 2, in a macrolevel analysis comparing average education and average happiness across 147 nations, a strong positive relationship was found: r = +0.59. This difference of correlations at the micro and macro levels presents a question for future research: why does education add to the happiness of average citizens in nations around the world but not to the happiness of highly educated people?
Keywords: Life satisfaction, school education, research synthesis, micro-macro level difference