Americans’ Well-Being: Specific Life Concerns

Abstract

We have traced the structure of peoples’ evaluations of well-being and established a framework for understanding the integration of these judgments. We will now look at these data from a simple, descriptive point of view to see what they tell us about well-being in the United States. This chapter presents the distributions (and arithmetic means) of responses from our complete national samples of American adults.¹ The results tell us much about how Americans evaluate many different aspects of their lives. (Chapter 9 focuses on differences in well-being among subgroups of the American population and Chapter 10 considers evaluations of life-as-a-whole.)