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Joan Aldous, ND's William R. Kenan Jr. professor of sociology, and Rodney F. Ganey, formerly of the University's Laboratory for Social Research, analyzed responses from 20 years of the national General Social Survey of attitudes. They wanted to learn more about gender differences in happiness as well as a perceived racial divide on the subject of happiness.
What they found confirmed some suspicions but challenged some assumptions. African Americans apparently continue to be less satisfied with their lives than whites -- not a great surprise, considering that blacks as a whole continue to be less well off economically than whites as a whole. Women, especially white women, are happier than men -- and have been for many years. The trend has persisted even though, on average, women continue to possess less power and fewer resources than men.
The conventional thinking among sociologists has been that women aren't really any happier than men, they're just more forthcoming about their feelings. Some also have speculated that it's easier for women, who tend to be more interested in family and other personal relationships, to achieve happiness than for men, who tend to measure their self-worth in terms of career accomplishments.
"Women are more likely to have the goal of getting along with persons rather than getting ahead of them," is how the researchers put it.
Aldous and Ganey say their analysis points to women becoming more like men in the future in that more women are looking "outside the home" for at least part of their satisfaction. That's produced a predictable decline in reported happiness since the late 1980s.
At the same time, men may not be as one-dimensional as assumed. Among married persons at least, the surveys show that what matters most to both husbands and wives now is how satisfied they are with both their home and work lives.
The researchers' article on their findings was scheduled to appear early in 1999 in the Journal of Family Issues.
-- Ed Cohen