Introduction
This paper briefly presents the results of a quantitative analysis of
data collected through the sixth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS)
in 2012 in Australia. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) – a rather
sophisticated statistical method to explore interrelated
variables/factors and to rule out spurious correlations – is used to
explore the social determinants of one of the most routine notions of
wellbeing in the Australian context. The findings, though being based on
a rather reductionist measure of Quality of Life, clearly confirm the
growing concerns around the inherent paradoxes of ‘being well’ in a
society dominated by the social forces of corporate capital.
WVS is one of the best-known research tools for measuring social values.
It is however not principally designed for measuring sophisticated
notions of well-being and thus the variables we can choose out of the
dataset are inadequate for exploring all the major dimensions and
determinants of wellbeing. However, the analysis draws on the most
recognized elements of subjective well-being and its results are
comparable to the findings of more specialized studies. Moreover, it
detects the role of less acknowledged factors and highlights what I
define as the ‘paradoxical nature of capitalist wellbeing’. Thus, the
analysis warrants more comprehensive studies of such relations.
In this study, subjective well-being (SW), reduced to people’s
assessment of their overall quality of life, is measured based on three
questions about the respondents’ self-assessed state of health ,general happiness , and overall life satisfaction .