Subjective Wellbeing: An Assessment of Competing Theories

This thesis set out to develop, examine, and test differing theoretical models of Subjective Wellbeing (SWB). SWB is the subjective evaluation of an individual’s satisfaction with life. Early research into SWB found objective conditions, such as age, education, and gender, were only weakly related to SWB. As such, researchers proposed dispositional tendencies to explain the large amount of unaccounted variance in SWB. This led to the proposal that two of the major dimensions of personality, extroversion and neuroticism, were strongly related to SWB. However an analysis of this research suggested that extroversion and neuroticism typically accounted for only a small amount of variance in SWB. Thus, researchers examined other variables that might explain more variance in SWB. Such variables included self-esteem, perceived control, and optimism, which were all found to relate moderately with SWB. These three variables, along with extroversion and neuroticism, were then incorporated into a theoretical model of SWB developed by Cummins, Gullone, and Lau (2002). This model was developed based on research by Cummins (1995, 1998) who found life satisfaction to be maintained within a narrow positive range despite a diversity of samples and methodologies. In this theoretical model, it was proposed that SWB is maintained homeostatically around an individual set-point through the operation of personality in conjunction with the variables self-esteem, perceived control, and optimism. However direct empirical support for this model was lacking. Accordingly Study 1 was conducted to directly test this homeostatic model of SWB with other, empirically supported models. These models were Multiple Discrepancies Theory (MDT; Michalos, 1985) and an affective-cognitive model of SWB (Davern, 2004). MDT proposes that SWB is the direct result of a series of perceived gaps in relation to