Trajectories of adolescent life satisfaction

Amy Orben1 , Richard E Lucas2 , Delia Fuhrmann1,3 , & Rogier A Kievit1

1
University of Cambridge
2
Michigan State University
3
King’s College London
Increasing global policy interest in measuring and improving population wellbeing has prompted
many academic investigations into the dynamics of life satisfaction across the lifespan. While
numerous international projects now track adults’ life satisfaction trajectories, little research has
simultaneously assessed both adults and adolescents using comparable samples and techniques.
Yet adolescence harbours developmental changes that could affect wellbeing far into adulthood:
adolescent life satisfaction trajectories are, therefore, critical to map and understand. Analysing
data from 91,267 UK participants aged 10-80 years, sampled annually for up to 9 years, this
study investigates how life satisfaction develops throughout adolescence. Using a latent growth
curve approach, we find a decrease in life satisfaction during adolescence, which is steeper
than at any other point across adolescence and adulthood. Further, adolescent females’ life
satisfaction decreases earlier than males’; this is the only substantial gender difference in life
satisfaction that emerges across the wide age range studied. The study highlights the importance
of adopting a lifespan perspective with respect to subjective wellbeing in areas spanning research,
policy and practice.

Keywords: life satisfaction, latent growth models, lifespan development, adolescents, gender
differences, subjective well-being
Word count: 6,448

The past decade has seen global wellbeing become progres-
sively enumerated, tracked and analysed in a bid to understand
and maximise human happiness (Helliwell et al., 2020). These
efforts range from the regular publication of wellbeing reports
(Gallup, 2019; Global Perspectives, 2020; Helliwell et al.,
2020; New Economics Foundation, 2020; OECD, 2020) to
calls for wellbeing indices to replace the predominant eco-
nomic and political metrics of GDP and GNP in steering
national and international politics (Costanza et al., 2014; Fox,
2012). In light of the diverse global crises impacting so-
ciety since the turn of the millennium, the demands for a
new economic and political approach focused on wellbeing
and sustainability have only strengthened (Costanza, 2020;
Harvey, 2020).

Responding to these developments, behavioural scientists

AO: MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and Emmanuel
College, University of Cambridge. REL: Department of Psychology,
Michigan State University. DF: MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences
Unit, University of Cambridge; Department of Psychology, King’s
College London. RAK: MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit,
University of Cambridge.
AO was supported by a College Research Fellowship from Em-
manuel College, University of Cambridge and by the UK Economic
and Social Research Council ES/T008709/1. RAK was supported
by the UK Medical Research Council SUAG/047 G101400.
The authors made the following contributions. Amy Orben:
Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Methodology,
Writing - Original Draft Preparation, Writing - Review & Editing;
Richard E Lucas: Writing - Review & Editing; Delia Fuhrmann:
Writing - Review & Editing; Rogier A Kievit: Methodology, Super-
vision, Writing - Original Draft Preparation, Writing - Review &
Editing.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Amy Orben, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of
Cambridge. E-mail: aco35@cam.ac.uk
have been increasingly attending to wellbeing as a valuable
area of academic research (Adler & Fleurbaey, 2016; Diener
et al., 2018). Much progress has been made in quantifying
subjective wellbeing on a population level (Diener et al., 2010)
and investigating its drivers and consequences on individuals
(Rohrer et al., 2018). Yet many of the factors empirically
and theoretically linked to wellbeing, such as health and dis-
posable income, change dramatically over the life course.
A robust understanding of how wellbeing develops across
different ages will therefore be a prerequisite for research to
successfully inform any policy aimed at maximising wellbe-
ing on a global scale.
In attempting to address this need, projects have tracked well-
being across the adult lifespan, often analysing data from tens
of thousands of participants from early adulthood into old age
(Baird et al., 2010; Cheng et al., 2017; Joshanloo & Jovanović,
2020; Schilling, 2005). Such work is highly important for
translational goals: policy to boost and sustain wellbeing
2 AMY ORBEN1 , RICHARD E LUCAS2 , DELIA FUHRMANN1,3 , & ROGIER A KIEVIT1
will only succeed if it is informed by accurate measurement
(Flake & Fried, in press) and robust behavioural research
findings (Munafò et al., 2017). Yet trajectories of adolescent
wellbeing have been routinely overlooked, even though this
time of life harbours some of the most wide-reaching changes
in brain structure and function (Bazargani et al., 2014; Gogtay
et al., 2004; Tamnes et al., 2017), cognitive abilities (Li et
al., 2004; Murre et al., 2013), sociality (Blakemore & Mills,
2014; Burnett et al., 2009; Kilford et al., 2016) and mental
health (Blakemore, 2019; Kessler et al., 2005, 2007). These
rapid changes and emerging mental habits have long-lasting
influence, reaching well into late adulthood (Deary, 2014;
Kessler et al., 2012). As an adequate understanding of well-
being trajectories in adolescence is critical for supporting
population wellbeing across the whole lifespan and identify-
ing maladaptive developments early, we present analyses that
provide an unprecedented perspective into life satisfaction
developments during this critical period of life.
Defining Life Satisfaction
There are many ways to conceptualize and operationalize a
state of overall wellbeing (for an overview of approaches, see
Adler & Fleurbaey, 2016). Affective approaches to defining
wellbeing focus on the emotions that people experience on a
moment-to-moment basis (Dolan & White, 2007) while for
objective list measures experts judge which components of
life are necessary for one to be “well” and assess those com-
ponents directly. One increasingly common approach is to
measure self-reported judgments of life satisfaction (e.g. “how
dissatisfied or satisfied you are with . . . your life overall”).
These judgments require respondents to evaluate the overall
quality of their lives as a whole, using whatever criteria they
believe are important. Life-satisfaction-based approaches to
assessing wellbeing have the advantage of allowing respon-
dents to decide for themselves which features of their lives are
most important and to derive an overall evaluation based on
their unique weighting of these domains (Diener et al., 2018;
Frijters & Krekel, 2019). The scores that can be derived
from these resource-efficient measures have been shown to be
reliable and valid in many contexts (Cheung & Lucas, 2014;
Lucas & Donnellan, 2012), which is why they are frequently
used in large-scale studies and recommended for application
in policy settings (e.g., Frijters & Krekel, 2019).
The majority of work tracking life satisfaction across the
lifespan has found a characteristic U-shaped curve, with a dip
in life satisfaction around middle age and an increase in later
life (Blanchflower & Oswald, 2008; Cheng et al., 2017). This
curve has been observed in samples from many different coun-
tries (Cheng et al., 2017). Some have argued, however, that
the U-shaped curve of life satisfaction is not as universal as
widely presumed (Galambos et al., 2020), e.g. Glenn (2009)
notes that some of the initial evidence only emerges after
questionable controls and Steptoe et al. (2015) argues that it is
not universal across all countries. Yet a decrease in life satis-
faction in early adulthood or adolescence has been commonly
found (Otterbach et al., 2018; Piper, 2015). This drop, during
a time when quality of life is seemingly increasing, could be
characterised as surprising yet it can be explained by multi-
ple mechanisms including growing financial, professional or
family pressures (McAdams et al., 2012).
Adolescent Life Satisfaction
The regular omission of adolescence by large-scale studies
of life satisfaction should raise concerns, because adoles-
cence is a time of rapid and fundamental change. In adoles-
cence, the foundations for adult life are set and many mental
health difficulties first emerge (Blakemore, 2019; Blakemore
& Mills, 2014; Fuhrmann et al., 2015; Kessler et al., 2005,
2007; Sawyer et al., 2018). The majority of academic life
satisfaction research has however focused on adults, due to
the nature of the constituent large-scale longitudinal studies
that sample only those able to fill in lengthy and personal
surveys. Although some lifespan research has included older
adolescents (Baird et al., 2010), or examined adolescents
specifically (Gilman & Huebner, 2003; Willroth et al., 2020),
most fail to study the whole adolescent age range of 10-24
years (Sawyer et al., 2018) and their transition into adulthood
(Huebner et al., 2000).
From the limited previous studies regarding adolescent life
satisfaction trajectories, evidence suggests that adolescence
is often accompanied by a prominent drop in life satisfaction
(Goldbeck et al., 2007; Moksnes & Espnes, 2013; Ullman
& Tatar, 2001; Willroth et al., 2020). Negative trajectories
throughout this time have also been evidenced for mood, de-
pression or psychopathology (Bradford et al., 2002; Casas
& González-Carrasco, 2019; González-Carrasco et al., 2017;
Kwong et al., 2019; Singh et al., 2015). The literature investi-
gating adolescent mental health changes has highlighted the
need to account for gender differences when probing such
wellbeing trajectories (Chui & Wong, 2016). For instance,
multiple studies suggest that adolescent girls do significantly
worse than adolescent boys in terms of subjective wellbeing
and internalising mental health (Campbell et al., 2020; Gold-
beck et al., 2007; González-Carrasco et al., 2017; Kwong et
al., 2019; Moksnes & Espnes, 2013; Uusitalo-Malmivaara,
2014). This “gender gap” hypothesis has been supported in
recent work that included measures of life satisfaction and
examined participants from 73 countries (Campbell et al.,
2020). It is unclear, however, how life satisfaction develops
longitudinally (Kievit et al., 2013), whether and how these
trajectories differ between genders and if these gender differ-
ences persist into adulthood (Joshanloo & Jovanović, 2020).
 LIFE SATISFACTION TRAJECTORIES
The Current Study
To establish a more in depth understanding of life satisfaction
trajectories in adolescence, the current study analyses unique
longitudinal data collected from 91,267 participants aged 10
to 80 years. In doing so, it introduces three core improvements
to the literature: 1) It uses data spanning younger adolescent,
older adolescent and adult age ranges to observe long-term
trends and trace the trajectory of adolescent life satisfaction
in light of full lifespan development; 2) It utilises longitudinal
modelling to differentiate within- and between-person patterns
and understand in-person change over the 14 years of ado-
lescence; 3) It investigates the gender differences highlighted
in previous adolescent mental health research to understand
possible disparities. In doing so, we test whether adolescence
harbours large-scale changes in life satisfaction trajectories
and if gender differences are evident during this process. The
study therefore provides some of the understanding currently
missing from initiatives aiming to put the measurement and
maximisation of wellbeing at the heart of global policymaking
(Costanza et al., 2014).
Results
Cross-Sectional Life Satisfaction Trajectories
To examine the trajectories of life satisfaction across adoles-
cence and the whole lifespan, we analysed data from the UK
Understanding Society longitudinal household panel survey
(University of Essex, Institute for Social and Economic Re-
search, 2018). 91,267 participants completed a single-item
satisfaction with life question annually for up to 9 waves (a
total of 417,989 measurement occasions; response options
differed slightly for ages 10-15 vs. ages 16-80 and are further
detailed in the methods section). The data was collected
between 2009 and 2018, and we included any participant
between the age of 10 and 80.
Plotting this data by age, we see the characteristic curve of
lifespan life satisfaction that has been shown in previous re-
search: there is a dip in life satisfaction scores during ado-
lescence, which continues until middle age and then a rise in
score during older age (Figure 1). While previous studies of
lifespan life satisfaction have mostly examined ages 15 or 16
onwards, this data shows that the difference in life satisfac-
tion scores between the beginning and end of adolescence is
substantial (life satisfaction at age 10 = 6.07 vs at age 24 =
5.09; difference equates to 0.84 SD using the SD at age 10).
Indeed, there is no other time in adulthood where differences
are so pronounced. The Supplementary Materials provide ad-
ditional analyses to rule out concerns about potential repeated
measures and instrumentation effects (Supplementary Figure
1 and Supplementary Figure 2 respectively).
3
6
Satisfaction with Life
4
2
10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80
Age
Figure 1. Cross-sectional trajectory of life satisfaction be-
tween age 10 and 80 (black line = mean value by age, grey
ribbon = 95% CI error bars, teal points = individual data
points). Please note that the error bars are very small due to
the large sample size analysed.
Longitudinal Life Satisfaction Trajectories
We continued our analyses by focusing on 10-24-year-old
adolescents to probe the nature of this change using longi-
tudinal modelling. While cross-sectional analyses allow us
to examine trends between study populations of different
ages, longitudinal analyses are necessary to track true de-
velopmental trajectories (see Supplementary Figure 3 for a
selection of 75 adolescent participant’s raw life satisfaction
scores highlighting large variation on an annual basis). We
fitted a Latent Growth Curve model (McArdle, 2009) to the
adolescent subset of the data using the R package lavaan
(Rosseel, 2012, missing data accounted for using robust full
information maximum likelihood estimation, Enders, 2001),
estimating latent variables that quantify the nature (shape)
of change as well as individual differences in baseline and
change over time (McArdle, 2009; Newsom, 2015). The
best fitting model was a latent basis model with freed error
variances, where only the first (0) and last (1) loadings were
constrained and all others were estimated (χ2 (102) = 1,055.14,
p < 0.001, RMSEA = 0.02 [0.02, 0.02], CFI = 0.91, SRMR
= 0.08).
There is a baseline model estimated life satisfaction of 6.10
(se = 0.02) at age 10, corresponding to an average response
between 6 and 7 on a 7-point scale. Yet, there are pronounced
between-person differences in life satisfaction at this time
point (variance est = 0.56, se = 0.02, p < 0.001). To study
how this change unfolds over time, we fit a finite basis model
which allowed us to estimate a flexible, non-linear shape of
change, which is shown in Figure 2. Life satisfaction de-
creases substantially in early adolescence while the decrease
decelerates in later adolescence. The mean slope (est = -0.99,
4 AMY ORBEN1 , RICHARD E LUCAS2 , DELIA FUHRMANN1,3 , & ROGIER A KIEVIT1

se = 0.03, p < 0.001) as well as the slope variance (est =
0.98, se = 0.07, p < 0.001) is pronounced, suggesting both
population level change and considerable individual differ-
ences in the degree to which individuals expressed this change.
We observed a substantial negative correlation between the
adolescents’ starting point at age 10 and their trajectory (est =
-0.31, se = 0.04, p < 0.001): those adolescents with a higher
initial life satisfaction show a steeper decrease throughout
Figure 4) and instrumentation effects (Supplementary Fig-
ure 5) do not affect this finding. Further, while adolescent
gender differences in life satisfaction appear (and disappear)
at slightly different age groups for different birth cohorts,
they are consistently present throughout the data collected
(Supplementary Figure 6).
A
Gender Female Male

adolescence, as expected when considering regression to the

Satisfaction with Life

mean. To visualize these individual differences in life satisfac- 6.00

tion patterns, we plot the model-implied trajectories for each 5.75

5.50
individual (Figure 2, black lines) as well as the trajectory for
5.25
a simulated participant starting at the population mean and 5.00
population mean slope (Figure 2, teal line). 4.75
10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80
Age

B 1e+22

Gender Diff.
1e+16

1e+10

1e+04

Figure 2. Longitudinal life satisfaction trajectories in Under-
standing Society data, ages 10 to 24 years. Latent Growth
Curve estimated life satisfaction trajectories for adolescents
(black lines) and trajectory for a simulated adolescent with a
mean life satisfaction at age 10 (teal line).
Gender Differences
Having investigated the trajectories of life satisfaction in ado-
lescence, it is important to examine possible gender differ-
ences that have been highlighted in previous work on ado-
lescent mental health (Chui & Wong, 2016). When differ-
entiating for gender, we find a stark difference emerging in
early adolescence: females show a more pronounced drop
in life satisfaction scores than males, but this difference lev-
els off in later adolescence (Figure 3, Panel A). Additional
analyses in the Supplementary Materials show that alternative
explanations such as repeated measurements (Supplementary
10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80
Age
Figure 3. Life satisfaction scores by age (10 to 80 years) for
91,267 participants in the Understanding Society study, show-
ing a rapid decrease in life satisfaction during adolescence that
differs for gender. Panel A: The lines split by gender show that
adolescence is also a time of substantial gender differences
with girls showing an earlier drop in life satisfaction scores
than boys. (Supplementary Figure 4 for the same plot only
incorporating the first data point collected for each participant
which shows similar trajectories.) Panel B: The ratio of how
much a model including gender differences is favoured over
a model without gender differences at different ages in the
data. Positive ratios show that a model accounting for gender
differences is favoured. The y-axis is plotted on a logarithmic
scale.
To quantify whether gender differences exist at certain ages,
we use a simple linear modelling approach where we predict
life satisfaction by gender for each one-year age group. We
use Akaike weights (AIC weights, Wagenmakers & Farrell,
2004) to test whether the model that includes gender outper-
forms the model without. Next, we use ratios of these AIC
weights to show by how much the model with gender differ-
ences incorporated is favoured by the AIC approach; negative
values favour a model without gender, positive values favour
a model that includes gender. These analyses shown in Figure
3 Panel B, illustrate that there is an overwhelmingly strong
preference for a model allowing for gender differences to exist
between the ages of 13 and 18 (AIC weights ratios > 39,000,
see also Supplementary Table 1). While some other ages like
10 (ratio = 139.97), 27 (ratio = 7.85) or 29 (ratio = 15.12)
additionally show modest evidence for gender differences,
this is likely due to the extremely large sample size. The
evidence for gender differences is clearly most compelling in
 LIFE SATISFACTION TRAJECTORIES 5

the mid-adolescence range from 13 to 18 years.

To understand the gender differences in life satisfaction trajec-
tories in this specific age range in more detail we harnessed
the longitudinal scope of the data by fitting multi-group Latent
Growth Curve models to participants between the ages of 10
and 21 (13-18 years +/- 3 years). We built our models on
20% of the data to test the modelling approach, before fitting
and adjusting them on the whole data. The total sample for
this analysis is 72,476 measurement occasions from 22,531
adolescents. Our final model’s fit statistics were acceptable
(χ2 (127) = 804.79, p < 0.001, RMSEA = 0.02 [0.02, 0.02],
CFI = 0.92, SRMR = 0.07).
To compare group differences and similarities we selectively
freed, and constrained, parts of the Latent Growth Curve
model within (over time) and between groups using a likeli-
hood ratio test. First, we examined life satisfaction at baseline.
Doing so, we find that females have a higher life satisfaction
than males at age 10 (4χ2 (1) = 24.36, p < 0.001; female: est
= 6.17, se = 0.02, p < 0.001; male: est = 6.03, se = 0.02, p <
0.001, the group difference was moderate in size: 0.19 pooled
SD). However, the variance of the mean life satisfaction at age
10 did not differ between genders (4χ2 (1) = 0.03, p = 0.85;
est = 0.53, se = 0.02). Second, we examine slope loadings.
We find that a free basis model with different patterns of
loadings between genders fits better (4χ2 (10) = 241.02, p <
0.001) than one that assumes the same developmental shape
(for a comparison of slope loadings see Supplementary Table
2). Although direct comparisons of gender differences in
slope intercept and variance are not straightforward given the
specific model constraints with regard to slope loadings, we
observe substantially more negative slopes in females than
males meaning that they decrease at a faster rate earlier in
adolescence (4χ2 (1) = 10.36, p = 0.001; female: est = -1.00,
se = 0.04, p < 0.001; male: est = -0.83, se = 0.04, p < 0.001).
Moreover, males showed greater variance for their slope esti-
mates than females; they therefore show more within group
differences in their life satisfaction trajectory over the time
span examined (constrained model failed to converge; female:
est = 0.82, se = 0.09, p < 0.001; male: est = 1.16, se = 0.12, p
< 0.001). Further we find that these gender differences remain
almost identical when we instead use a model with equality
constrained slope loadings (Supplementary Figure 7). Figure 4. Longitudinal Latent Growth Curve Models of life
satisfaction between 10 and 21 years differentiating by gender.
The differences between the life satisfaction trajectories in Panel A = Latent Growth Curve Model implied trajectories
males and females can be seen when plotting the model im- of life satisfaction for all participants (split by gender). The
plied trajectories of the participants in the data. Females show coloured lines show the implied trajectory for a simulated
a quicker decrease from a higher initial life satisfaction, while adolescent girl or boy who starts at their gender’s mean life
males show a later decrease but more variance in the amount satisfaction at age 10. Panel B: The model implied trajec-
they decrease over adolescence (Figure 4). The coloured lines tories for a simulated adolescent girl and boy who starts at
in Figure 4 that plot the trajectory for a simulated adolescent their gender’s mean life satisfaction at age 10 are overlaid to
starting at their gender mean and gender mean slope reinforce accommodate comparison.
this trend and show that female and male differences decrease
in late adolescence and ultimately disappear around age 21
6 AMY ORBEN1 , RICHARD E LUCAS2 , DELIA FUHRMANN1,3 , & ROGIER A KIEVIT1
(Figure 4, Panel A coloured lines and Figure 4, Panel B colour
lines overlaid to aid comparison). Taken together, our findings
suggest that during adolescence males and females differ in
the nature of their life satisfaction trajectory, the extent to
which they express these changes and the degree to which
they differ from each other.
Discussion
This study analysed a large-scale longitudinal data-set with
up to 9 waves of annual life satisfaction data from 91,267 par-
ticipants aged 10 to 80 to examine life satisfaction trajectories
during adolescence and beyond. Cross-sectionally we find
that adolescence harbours the steepest and most pronounced
drops in life satisfaction scores across the whole adult lifes-
pan. Further, this period is unique in showing a substantial
gender difference in life satisfaction levels. These gender
differences are also present in the longitudinal life satisfaction
trajectories modelled using Latent Growth Curves: females
start at a slightly higher baseline life satisfaction at age 10, but
show an earlier decrease in life satisfaction than adolescent
males. Male life satisfaction trajectories only “catch up” later
in adolescence when life satisfaction scores converge across
genders.
The study’s emphasis on a) analysing data that spans the
whole of adolescence and the adult lifespan, b) supplement-
ing cross-sectional comparisons with longitudinal data, and
c) a detailed differentiation between genders, provides unique
insights into adolescent life satisfaction trajectories. It be-
comes clear how adolescents show the steepest drop in life
satisfaction between childhood and old age. While we still
lack a clear understanding of what might be driving this phe-
nomenon, it is important to study further: changes and differ-
ences in adolescence can influence many later life outcomes
(Blakemore & Mills, 2014; Deary, 2014; Fuhrmann et al.,
2015).
Life Satisfaction Decreases in Adolescence
There are multiple different explanations for why adolescents
show drastic decreases in life satisfaction. First, the drop in
life satisfaction scores during adolescence could be driven by
conditions of life getting worse during this period, which in
turn decreases how satisfied adolescents are with their life.
While life satisfaction is not completely subsumed into men-
tal health, well-mapped mental health trends in adolescence
show increases in mental disorders such as depression or
anxiety and decreases in other forms of subjective wellbeing
(Bradford et al., 2002; Casas & González-Carrasco, 2019;
González-Carrasco et al., 2017; Kwong et al., 2019; Singh et
al., 2015). It has been widely understood that adolescence is
a time when many struggle with mental health, and therefore
the decrease in life satisfaction scores could represent such a
developmental phenomenon (Goldbeck et al., 2007). Some
have also linked these changes to hormonal differences, social
insecurity, increased autonomy or uncertainty (Andersen &
Teicher, 2008; Bisegger et al., 2005; Blakemore, 2019).
Second, the appraisal process that determines the response
to a life satisfaction question might also change throughout
adolescence due to alterations in cognitive or social processes.
As adolescence is a time of substantial cognitive change and
maturation (Murre et al., 2013; Tamnes et al., 2013), this
could be modifying the way life satisfaction questions are
interpreted and answered. For example, the continued de-
velopment of the “social brain” in adolescence allows for
increased and improved mentalising, i.e. adolescents’ skill
in understanding how others think and feel (Blakemore &
Mills, 2014; Kilford et al., 2016; Sebastian et al., 2011). Such
cognitive developments are paralleled by social changes: ado-
lescents’ interest in peers increases and so does the influence
of their peer group on behaviour (Maxwell, 2002). Friends
also become prominent drivers of high quality of life in this
age group (Goldbeck et al., 2007; Helseth & Misvaer, 2010).
A decrease in life satisfaction scores could therefore also be
linked to changes in cognitive and social appraisals of what a
question about one’s satisfaction with life means, such as an
increased sense of a larger social world or comparing one’s
own life to more stringent and competitive benchmarks.
Gender Differences in Life Satisfaction Trajectories
Empirical evidence concerning gender differences in mental
health problems during adolescence suggest robust differ-
ences in prevalence of mental health problems in this time of
life, with females having a higher incidence of internalising
problems such as depression and anxiety (Goldbeck et al.,
2007). Indeed, many have suggested that there is a “gender
gap”, where females score systematically lower on subjective
wellbeing questionnaires than males (Campbell et al., 2020).
Such a gender gap hypothesis is supported when our adoles-
cent data is examined cross-sectionally: yet longitudinally it
becomes apparent that the gender gap closes later in adoles-
cence and does not reappear across the lifespan. This is in line
with epidemiological studies highlighting a narrowing of the
mental health gender gap over time (Seedat et al., 2009). The
data could therefore be showing an “accelerated maturation”
of adolescent girls. As girls proceed through certain devel-
opmental stages, e.g. puberty (Sisk & Foster, 2004 ), earlier
than their male counterparts, this might induce a decrease in
life satisfaction earlier in adolescence . While the “gender
gap” hypothesis encourages researchers and policymakers to
focus on boosting female life satisfaction and wellbeing, an
“accelerated maturation” hypothesis presents very different
implications. Male decreases in life satisfaction should not
 LIFE SATISFACTION TRAJECTORIES
be discounted or overlooked, but interventions might need
to be adapted in both scope and timing to fit their subjects’
trajectories. Males, for example, have a higher incidence of
externalizing problems (e.g. alcohol and substance use) than
females (Kessler et al., 2005, 2007; Seedat et al., 2009), and
these difficulties might emerge later in adolescence.
The life satisfaction trajectories found in our data are not just
different between genders in terms of timing, but also in terms
of form. Our Latent Growth Curve models show that males
exhibit more variance in the slope of their life satisfaction
trajectories than females. This finding aligns with the general
developmental pattern sometimes described as “greater male
variability” (see Hyde, 2014 for a review). Qualitatively dif-
ferent developmental trajectories for females and males have
been shown in a variety of domains: adult males show greater
variability in cognitive ability (Deary, Irwing, et al., 2007;
Johnson et al., 2008; Lakin, 2013), educational attainment
(Deary, Strand, et al., 2007; Lehre et al., 2009; Machin &
Pekkarinen, 2008), weight (Lehre et al., 2009), personality
(Borkenau et al., 2013) and brain structure (Ritchie et al.,
2018). In meta-analyses, greater male variability effects are
relatively robust but small in size (Hyde, 2014). It is not clear
what the source of such a potential difference in variability
is, with a number of potential biological and social factors
highlighted in the literature, including differences in hormonal
development, societal expectations, lifestyle behaviours or
peer influence (Goldbeck et al., 2007). More research there-
fore needs to be done to understand what is driving the qualita-
tively different life satisfaction trajectories in male adolescents
in comparison to their female counterparts.
By innovating and improving on the current status of research,
this study has highlighted the need for increased awareness
and interest in the trajectory of life satisfaction from early
adolescence into adulthood. Its findings open up many av-
enues for potential research, including examining how ma-
jor changes in cognitive and social appraisal might be alter-
ing adolescents’ response to life satisfaction questions and
whether an “accelerated maturation” hypothesis might explain
the apparent gender differences in life satisfaction across this
period. Further, there is potential for future research to ad-
dress some of the limitations of this study. Firstly, our work
relies on a single item measure of life satisfaction; while this
measure triumphs in its ease of data collection, a more diverse
set of measurements would be helpful to gauge measurement
changes, challenges and nuances. Next, the data was col-
lected from a diverse UK population, but to guide a global
understanding of life satisfaction a greater variety of countries
would need to be studied. More research considering longi-
tudinal subjective wellbeing and life satisfaction trajectories
in diverse populations will therefore be necessary to progress
this area of increasing academic, political and public interest.
7
Conclusion
The last decade has seen adolescence become progressively
recognised as a core developmental stage; adolescence is a pe-
riod where many of the key health, social and developmental
trajectories experienced in adulthood first crystallise (Blake-
more, 2019; Lamblin et al., 2017; Orben et al., 2020). This
recognition has led to large research and funding investments
that aim to improve adolescents’ mental health, cognitive and
social outcomes (UK Research & Innovation, 2020; Wellcome
Trust, 2020). In parallel, there has been a wave of interest
in measuring and improving global wellbeing levels, with
initiatives focusing primarily on adults (Gallup, 2019; Global
Perspectives, 2020; Helliwell et al., 2020; New Economics
Foundation, 2020; OECD, 2020). These two developments
have been co-occurring without much reciprocal recognition
and little collaboration. A selective analysis of only our ado-
lescent data would, however, have overlooked the delayed
decrease in male life satisfaction during late adolescence and
would have favoured a “gender gap” hypothesis where fe-
males consistently underperform males. A selective analysis
of only our adult data would have let the dramatic drops in
adolescent life satisfaction and stark gender differences go
unnoticed. This paper therefore highlights the importance
of merging adult and adolescent research perspectives and
adopting a lifespan perspective to global wellbeing to avoid
such limitations in future.
Methods
For this study we analysed the Understanding Society dataset:
an annual longitudinal study of about 40,000 UK households
started in 2009 and run by the Institute for Social and Eco-
nomic Research at the University of Essex (University of
Essex, Institute for Social and Economic Research, 2018).
The data is collected annually, however because of its large
scale each wave is collected over 2 years. We use 9 waves
(2009-2018) of data as released in February 2020. The study
consists of an adult questionnaire completed by anyone 16
and over in the households surveyed and also a youth sur-
vey that is filled out by 10-15-year-old adolescents in each
household. Participants can age in and out of certain surveys,
e.g. completing the youth survey and then graduating into
the adult survey. At study onset the population sampled was
representative. It now consists of multiple different samples:
the General Population Sample, the Ethnic Minority Boost
Sample, the former British Household Panel Survey sample
and an Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Boost Sample (for
more information see Lynn, 2009).
This study uses life satisfaction, age and gender measures
from both the youth and adult survey. The youth survey con-
sisted of a paper questionnaire which adolescents were handed
8 AMY ORBEN1 , RICHARD E LUCAS2 , DELIA FUHRMANN1,3 , & ROGIER A KIEVIT1
by the interviewer; they were asked to seal it in an envelope
after they finished. Every year the survey asked about “how
you feel about different aspects of your life”. Adolescents
were given a visual analogue scale from 1 = very happy smiley
face to 7 = very sad smiley face and told that “1 is completely
happy and 7 is not at all happy”. They were then asked to
“put an “x” in the box which comes closest to expressing
how you feel about each of the following things. . . ”. Multiple
areas of life satisfaction were prompted in the following order:
your school work, your appearance, your family, your friends,
the school you go to. At the end of the page they were then
asked: “which best describes how you feel about your life as
a whole?” (same seven response options as prior questions).
We use this last question in our analysis but flip the scale so
that higher scores mean higher levels of life satisfaction.
Adults and older adolescents (16+) were also asked annually
about their life satisfaction in a computer-assisted part of their
questionnaire. Like in the youth survey, the interviewer could
therefore not see the majority of participants’ responses. The
instructions were the following: “Here are some questions
about how you feel about your life. Please select the answer
which you feel best describes how dissatisfied or satisfied
you are with the following aspects of your current situation.”
Like in the youth survey, participants were first asked about
certain sub-domains in the following order: health, income
and amount of leisure time, with response options from 1
= completely dissatisfied to 7 = completely satisfied. They
were then asked about satisfaction with “your life overall”,
which we analyse in this study. While the questions were
slightly different in terms of wording and text/visual scale, we
assumed equality between the life satisfaction asked of young
adolescents and the question asked to older adolescents and
adults.
Age was derived by Understanding Society from self-reported
date of birth for the youth and young adult/adult sample.
Further gender was taken from the “stable characteristics”
file provided by Understanding Society which integrates all
waves of data collection to ensure the most accurate report
is used. In the youth survey, participants reported annually
whether they were “male” or “female”; in the adult sample
they were asked to confirm their sex collected previously or
report it as “male” or “female”. They were allowed to refuse
to respond. If sex reporting was inconsistent, i.e. if it varied
between waves, the gender was labelled as “0” in the stable
file and we recode these instances as NA (30 measurement
occasions).
Before proceeding to analyse the data, we imposed inclu-
sion criteria. First, we only included those participants in
our final dataset that were in the age range specified for the
survey they filled out: i.e. we included from the youth survey
only participants over age 9 and under age 16 (excluded 61
measurement occasions) and only included those from the
adult sample that were over age 15 (excluded 65 measurement
occasions). For those participants who completed the survey
twice for one year of age we excluded the second time the data
was collected (excluding 417,989 measurement occasions).
Further, we excluded participants over 80 to match UK life ex-
pectancy (excluding 15,537 measurement occasions). Lastly,
we deleted all those cases where gender was NA (31 mea-
surement occasions) because these participants could not be
assigned to a specific gender group during the analyses. Gen-
der could be NA because, for example, a participant changed
their reporting on the sex (“male” or “female”) item during
the study or because they decided to refuse responding to this
item. We note here that we label the male/female variable
as “gender” rather than “sex”, while the latter is used in the
question posed by Understanding Society.
After exclusions, we are left with 417,989 measurement occa-
sions from a total of 91,267 participants aged 10 to 80. Not
all participants answered the same number of waves: 1 wave
= 19,566; 2 waves = 12,220; 3 waves = 8,927; 4 waves =
7,692; 5 waves = 6,241; 6 waves = 6,130; 7 waves = 7,369; 8
waves = 11,232; 9 waves = 11,890.
Cross-sectional Analyses
To examine the cross-sectional trends in life satisfaction in
adolescence and across the lifespan, we first plotted the life
satisfaction scores by age to examine the cross-sectional tra-
jectories of life satisfaction across the 70-year age range (Fig-
ure 1). To test for the effect of repeated measures, we plotted
only the first wave of data collected from each participant in
Supplementary Figure 1. Further, to test for instrumentation
effects we plotted separate lines for different birth years in
Supplementary Figure 2, showing that the steep decreases in
life satisfaction between age 10 and 24 are present in each
year group. Finally, we also plotted a GAM for life satisfac-
tion over the adolescent age range from 10 to 24 years and
a selection of 75 random participants’ data (Supplementary
Figure 3).
Longitudinal Analyses
To analyse the longitudinal adolescent data (age 10-24 years)
we fit a series of Latent Growth Curve Models (McArdle,
2009; Newsom, 2015) using the package Lavaan (Rosseel,
2012) in R. We estimate our model using robust Full Informa-
tion Maximum Likelihood with robust Hubert-White standard
errors to account for deviations from multivariate normality.
To assess model fit we report the chi-square test with degrees
of freedom, RMSEA and its confidence interval, the Compar-
ative Fit Index and the standardized root mean squared resid-
uals. We report model fit (Schermelleh-Engel et al., 2003)
as follows: RMSEA < 0.05 (acceptable: 0.05-0.08), CFI >
 LIFE SATISFACTION TRAJECTORIES 9

0.97 (acceptable: 0.95-0.97) and SRMR < 0.05 (acceptable: intercept parameters).
0.05-0.10), although we note that LGM’s may show poorer
fit in some circumstances (DeRoche, 2009). To estimate the Code Availability Statement
shape of change, we fit different functional shapes, including
a standard linear growth model (with slope loadings 0, 1,
The data cleaning and analysis code is avail-
2 etc.), a quadratic growth model, as well as a latent-basis
able on the OSF: https://osf.io/9kd2r/?view_only=
model where, in our case, only the first (0) and last (1) load-
d3dbcef9a05e431b9c22b91e466c01a3
ing are constrained (McArdle 2009, p. 594) and all others
estimated, maximizing the flexibility of the shape which can
be captured. We compare a series of models that vary in their Data Availability Statement
functional form and then in their error variances using the
(scaled) likelihood ratio test. The best model was found to be Understanding Society is an initiative funded by the Eco-
a latent basis model with freed error variances (model with nomic and Social Research Council and various Government
constrained error variances did not converge), where only the Departments, with scientific leadership by the Institute for
first (0) and last (1) loadings are constrained and all others are Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, and sur-
estimated (compared to a linear model: 4χ2 (20) = 63.02, p < vey delivery by NatCen Social Research and Kantar Public.
0.001; quadratic model did not converge, McArdle, 2009). The research data are distributed by the UK Data Service.
The University of Essex Ethics Committee has approved all
data collection on Understanding Society main study and
Gender Differences innovation panel waves, including asking consent for all data
linkages except to health records. The data is available for
To examine gender differences, we first examined the data download, after the completion of a registration form, from
from age 10 to 80 cross-sectionally (Figure 3, Panel A). As the UK Data Service: University of Essex, Institute for Social
previously we added analyses to refute concerns about re- and Economic Research, NatCen Social Research, Kantar
peated measures and instrumentation effects in the Supple- Public. (2019). Understanding Society: Waves 1-9, 2009-
mentary Materials (Supplementary Figures 4, 5 and 6) To 2018 and Harmonised BHPS: Waves 1-18, 1991-2009. [data
investigate when gender differences emerge, we used the r- collection]. 12th Edition. UK Data Service. SN: 6614,
package lavaan to fit two types of model to data at each age. http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-6614-13.
One model predicted life satisfaction by taking into account
gender (satisfaction_life ~ gender) while the other model
did not include this factor (satisfaction_life ~ 1). We then
used AIC information criteria to examine which model was
preferred in better predicting life satisfaction while discount-
ing unnecessary complexity. We compared the models using
AIC weights (Wagenmakers & Farrell, 2004). As seen in
Figure 3 Panel B, the model which accounted for gender
differences were overwhelmingly preferred at age 13-18. In
Supplementary Table 1 we detail the AIC weights for each
age.
We then continued by running longitudinal models to look at
the life satisfaction trajectories. Latent Growth Curve models
were fitted to examine gender differences in the sample aged
10 to 21 years (72,476 measurement occasions from 22,531
adolescents). As these were more exploratory in nature, we
first fit models to 20% of data before expanding to the whole
dataset, at which time we added some minor changes to the
model due to fit. Like in the LGC model above, we first
examined the functional form (linear, quadratic or latent-basis
model), comparing the models using a likelihood ratio test.
We progressed using a latent-basis model and then freed or
constrained error variances between waves and groups. Lastly,
we used a similar approach to compare group differences in
substantive parameters (e.g. mean/variance of the slope or
10 AMY ORBEN1 , RICHARD E LUCAS2 , DELIA FUHRMANN1,3 , & ROGIER A KIEVIT1
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