Building Weighted-Domain Composite Indices of Life Satisfaction with Data Envelopment Analysis

The specialised literature has frequently addressed the relationship between life domains and people's satisfaction with life. Some researchers have posed questions regarding the importance of domains, therefore interpreting them as weightings and creating domain satisfaction indices. This pape...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social indicators research Vol. 117; no. 1; pp. 257 - 274
Main Authors: Guardiola, Jorge, Picazo-Tadeo, Andrés J.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Dordrecht Springer 01.05.2014
Springer Netherlands
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Communities
Composite indices
Computers
Correlation
Criteria
Data analysis
Data envelopment analysis
Decision making
Discriminant analysis
Econometrics
Economic models
Efficiency metrics
Factor Analysis
Happiness
History, theory and methodology
Human Geography
Indexes
Integers
Job Satisfaction
Least Squares Statistics
Life Satisfaction
Likert Scales
Literary criticism
Methodology
Methodology (Data Analysis)
Mexico
Microeconomics
Modeling
Morality
Multiple criteria decision making
Personality Traits
Public Health
Quality of Life Research
Regression (Statistics)
Researchers
Rural areas
Rural Communities
Satisfaction
Social research
Social Sciences
Sociology
Statistical Analysis
Studies
Term weighting
Water access
Weighting
Wellbeing
Mexico
Life satisfaction indices
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Domains of life
Weightings
Methodology
Multi-Criteria-Decision-Making
Data Analysis
Field Work
Index
Psychological well-being
Rural Community
Data Envelopment Analysis
ISSN:0303-8300, 1573-0921
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The specialised literature has frequently addressed the relationship between life domains and people's satisfaction with life. Some researchers have posed questions regarding the importance of domains, therefore interpreting them as weightings and creating domain satisfaction indices. This paper illustrates how Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Multi-Criteria-Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques can be employed to compute domain-based composite indices of life satisfaction and weightings for life domains. Furthermore, an empirical application is performed on a sample of 178 people living in a rural community in Yucatan (Mexico). One of the main features of the aforementioned techniques is that weightings might differ from one individual to another. Accordingly, several weighting schemes are used to compute different life satisfaction indices, in addition to a constant equally-weighted index. Based on the goodness-of-fit criteria commonly used in this literature, our main result is that DEA-MCDM indicators of life satisfaction do not improve the relationship with self-reported life satisfaction in comparison to the equally-weighted index.
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ISSN:0303-8300
1573-0921
DOI:10.1007/s11205-013-0346-3