Leite, Â., Costa, A., Dias, P.C., Veenhoven, R. (2024).
In: Magalhães, L., Ferreira Lopes, M.J., Nobre, B., Onofre Pinto, J.C. (eds) Humanistic Perspectives in Happiness Research. Happiness Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38600-8_10
Education provides individuals with a set of skills that are assumed to allow them to drive better lives and, in the end, live 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 micro-level of individuals and the other at the macro-level of nations using a quantitative approach based on the finding archive World Database of Happiness (WDoH; https://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl/). In study one, the micro-level of analysis explored the link between individuals’ years of schooling and educational level and happiness. 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 multi-variate analyses that control possible spurious variables, such as income; the average partial correlation is zero. In study two, a macro-level analysis comparing average education and average happiness across 147 nations, found a strong positive relationship: r = +0.59. This difference between correlation at the micro and macro level present a question for future research, why does education add to the happiness of the average citizen in nations but not to the happiness of higher educated?
Keywords: Life satisfaction, school education, research synthesis, micro-macro level difference
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