| To Register SMDM Homepage | |
|
|
|
||||
Purpose:
Studies have shown that money has much less effect on happiness than people believe it does. For example, real income has quadrupled in the US over the past 5 decades, and yet the overall happiness of the American people has hardly changed. Nevertheless, financial status may play a larger role under some circumstances. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we examined the hypothesis that the relationship between financial status and subjective well-being would be moderated by health status. Specifically we predicted that financial status would matter more in predicting well-being for people in poorer health, or for people who had recently experienced the onset of a physical disability.
Methods:
The HRS is a longitudinal study of over 16,000 individuals aged 51 to 61, surveyed every two years since 1992. The HRS uses measures of financial status -- including savings, pensions, investments, and real estate - to create an index of overall net worth. In addition, it contains many measures of health status and disability, and a well-being measure. Using this data, we determined whether participants had recently experienced the onset of a significant physical disability. The longitudinal design allowed us to test whether financial resources prior to the onset of disability affected later well-being.
Results
Using hierarchical linear modeling in a combination of cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, we found evidence that:
1) Wealth was a stronger predictor of well-being for people with lower subjective health (p < .01), for people who have cancer (p < .01), and for people who currently have a physical disability (p <.01).
2) Wealth was a much stronger predictor for people who report a new disability, accounting for 3 times as much variance in well-being as for people who were not disabled (p < .01).
3) Prior wealth buffered well-being after the onset of a disability (p < .05).
Conclusions:
Financial resources are a larger predictor of well-being for people who are in poorer health, and especially after the onset of a serious physical disability. Specifically, greater net worth appeared to buffer well-being after the onset of a disability; people below the median in net worth experienced a decline in well-being that was several times larger than the modest decline observed for people above the median.
See more of Oral Concurrent Session B - Health Economics
See more of The 26th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (October 17-20, 2004)