Dissatisfied with Life, but Having a Good Day: Time-Use and Well-Being of the Unemployed

By Andreas Knabe, Steffen Rätzel, Ronnie Schöb, Joachim Weimann. Social Science Research Network, 2010

400 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We apply the Day Reconstruction Method to compare unemployed and employed people with respect to their subjective assessment of emotional affects, differences in the composition and duration of activities during the course of a day, and their self-reported life satisfaction. Employed persons are more satisfied with their life than the unemployed and report more positive feelings when engaged in similar activities. Weighting these activities with their duration shows, however, that average experienced utility does not differ between the two groups. Although the unemployed feel sadder when engaged in similar activities, they can compensate this by using the time the employed are at work in more enjoyable ways. Our finding that unemployment affects life satisfaction and experienced utility differently may be explained by the fact that people do not adjust their aspirations when becoming unemployed but face hedonic adaptation to changing life circumstances, triggered by the opportunity to use the time in a way that yields higher levels of satisfaction than working.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dfce6c9be9a2130398316ffcf0ec235d1d818cb9

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In General Health Professions

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Changing Identity: Retiring from Unemployment (2014, positive): “In fact, the income loss would overestimate the cost of unemployment as has been shown by Knabe et al. (2010): substituting leisure for working time leads to almost complete hedonic adaptation while it is the failure to meet ones’ own social norms harms the unemployed.”
Time Use, Emotional Well-Being, and Unemployment: Evidence from Longitudinal Data (2012, background): “6 See Krueger and Mueller (2010) for details.”
Mood and mode: does how we travel affect how we feel? (2014, background): “2 Knabe et al. (2010) find that the unemployed are generally less happy than the employed while engaging in any specific activity, but in the aggregate they are no less happy because they engage in more pleasant activities while the employed are working.”
Measuring subjective well-being for public policy (2011, background): “DRM data on affect have generally found weak associations between SWB and these events (Kahneman et al, 2004; Knabe et al, 2010).”