Country Satisfaction Linked to Life Satisfaction

Gallup is constantly searching for the answer to what it is that makes for a good, productive life. Gallup has already uncovered that being highly engaged in your job, spending 6 to 7 hours socializing per day, and exercising 5 to 6 days per week are all factors that make a person more likely to be thriving in their life.

Now, Gallup’s global surveys reveal that the more satisfied a person is with their country, the more likely he or she is to be satisfied with their life. To be specific, the higher people rate their country on a ladder scale, the higher they rate their lives using the same scale. The relationship is even stronger for people who have low incomes or live in relatively poorer nations.

These findings are exactly what the study’s lead author, Mike Morrison, a Ph. D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, thought he would find. “We predicted that people who were experiencing rough times -- those with little money or living in a very poor country -- would look to other areas where they might be able to console themselves,” Morrison said in a press release. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, is based on Gallup’s world polls of 1,000 people in each of 128 countries.

Co-author and Gallup Senior Scientist Ed Diener believes the findings advance the study of wellbeing as they go beyond previous research, which has focused on the individual, and show that societal characteristics can also be important to happiness. “What is more, societal characteristics become even more important to happiness when one’s life is not going so well,” Diener said in the press release, connecting this to why nationalism, sports team loyalty, and religion can be particularly strong during tough times.

The study also discovered that the link between national satisfaction and life satisfaction is stronger in non-Western nations than in Western ones, concluding that this is due to the importance of individualism in Western countries versus the value of the group in non-Western places.

The bottom line, though, is that having a sense of pride and contentment with one’s country may lead to a perceived higher quality of life, which the authors' say is useful information for developing better-quality-of-life improvement strategies, especially for impoverished nations.