Defining and describing what constitutes “the good life” for individuals and communities has been a vexing challenge for social scholars…

So begins a recent article^1,2 in Environment and Behavior (subscription required)

…[T]he term “life satisfaction”, which comes from the psychological literature, refers to the cognitive evaluation of one’s happiness or subjective wellbeing and involves comparing the fulfillment of individual needs, goals, and aspirations to a meaningful standard.

One unique aspect of this study was that the team used surveys to assess people’s life satisfaction at two different scales: (1) their own lives and (2) their neighborhoods.

Bottom line:

• Income and home ownership mattered more to individual satisfaction compared to satisfaction with neighborhoods.
• In contrast, neighborhood satisfaction was more strongly correlated with social capital (shared knowledge, norms, rules, and networks that facilitate collective experience) and satisfaction with the natural environment in the neighborhood.
• These results corroborate a large body of prior research indicating that wealth alone is not the only explanation for life satisfaction–our communities and environments matter as well.
• Given that more people now live in urban environments than at any point in human history, this speaks to the need for (re)developing cities to promote green spaces and social networks.

¹Vemuri, A., et al. (2009) A Tale of Two Scales: Evaluating the Relationship Among Life Satisfaction, Social Capital, Income, and the Natural Environment at Individual and Neighborhood Levels in Metropolitan Baltimore. Environment and Behavior, (Online First edition).

²Bowdoin people can link to the article here.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinl8888/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0