Free and Happy? Dynamics of Subjective Well-being in Lithuania in the Perspective of Generational Change

Abstract

In response to the increasing attention to quality-of-life issues, the study of happiness has recently become increasingly popular in the world as a separate field of social research. Researchers are addressing such questions as: What determines the fact that people feel happy? Are we happy ‘the same way’? What does this reveal about us as a society? Does happiness mean the same things to people of different generations? Does the experience of living in a free society of higher welfare engender generations of happier people?
Using data from the European Values Survey (1990, 1999, 2008, 2017), this article addresses the issue of the dynamics of happiness in the Lithuanian society in order to find out how different macro- and micro-level factors line up in the public welfare equation, and how it is related to the generational change of the country’s population, paying a special attention to the specifics of the so-called The First Independence Generation. To achieve the objective of the study, different methods of empirical data analysis are used: descriptive statistics, tests of covariance and comparison of means, logistic regression. The analysis revealed significant differences in happiness between different social generations of the Lithuanian population, even after controlling for other factors influencing it.