The Rapid Decline of Happiness: Exploring Life Satisfaction among Young People across the World
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Adolescence and early adulthood are periods of rapid physical and emotional development and coincide with important social and economic processes in the lifecycle. This group now represents a quarter of the world’s population, and the antecedents of many later-life health problems occur during this period of life. We report on the level and determinants of life satisfaction among individuals age 15–24 years across the main regions of the world and contrast these findings with those for adults age 25–59 years using Gallup World Poll data from 145 countries/territories in 2014 and 2015. We find that adolescence and youth is the age range during which life satisfaction declines most rapidly in all regions of the world, except South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Additionally, in the three regions where overall life satisfaction is lowest, MENA, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the life satisfaction gap among youth in the poorest and richest quintile is the largest, reflecting the reality that children in some of the world’s poorest countries already face adult realities and responsibilities by this age. Correlates for young people and adults are strikingly similar and include material conditions, such as financial life and food security, and noneconomic factors such as social support, health, and internet access. Differences across the life-course emerge in life satisfaction correlates of education and health, which are stronger for adults than young people.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".