The midlife well-being, gender and marital status

This paper provides an evaluation of subjective well-being in middle-aged Poles. 1776 healthy men and 1258 healthy postmenopausal women, aged 40-65 years, were polled in cross-sectional population-based study conducted between 2000-2003 in all but Eastern part of Poland. Satisfaction with life and 11 life domains was evaluated using Polish version of Life Satisfaction Index developed and validated by Campbell (1976). ANCOVA models were run to evaluate the main effects of age, gender, category of marital status, level of education and urbanization as predictive factors for variation in subjective well-being. Multiple Correspondence Analysis was run to evaluate satisfaction with particular life domains. The findings revealed the significance of gender in moderating the effects of marital status on subjective wellbeing. Partnered midlife men and women were likely to enjoy a higher level of well-being and fare better than their non-partnered peers on many life outcome variables. Gender, marital status and education, the three main predictive factors of midlife well-being and age as a covariate explained 29% of variation in subjective well-being. Marital status was the most powerful predictive factor for variation in males’ subjective well-being and education was the most powerful for women. The general picture for midlife Polish people drawn from the study indicated a moderate level of global life satisfaction and the lowest level of satisfaction in the following social life domains: income, standard of living and life in Poland.