Back to Baseline in Britain: Adaptation in the British Household Panel Survey
Published online on December 17, 2012
Abstract
We look for evidence of adaptation in wellbeing to major life events using eighteen waves of British panel data. Adaptation to marriage, divorce, birth of child and widowhood appears to be rapid and complete; this is not so for unemployment. These findings are remarkably similar to those in previous work on German panel data. Equally, the time profiles with life satisfaction as the wellbeing measure are very close to those using a twelve‐item scale of psychological functioning. As such, the phenomenon of adaptation may be a general one, rather than being found only in German data or using single‐item wellbeing measures.