International Decreases in Student Life Satisfaction

 

International Decreases in Student Life Satisfaction
(OECD PISA) [Preliminary]

This post is related to (but not a part of) the Youth Suicide Rise project

Summary:

Life satisfaction, as measured by students on a scale of 0-10 in PISA surveys, decreased between 2015 and 2018 in 26 out of 29 participating OECD countries (in 24 at p < 0.5 significance). The only country with a statistically significant increase was Korea.

Life Satisfaction Question

The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) included in 2015 and 2018 this item on its student questionnaire:

Results

The OECD average decreased from 7.34 to 7.04; the median change, among the 29 OECD nations participating, was 0.3 points. The largest absolute decrease was in the UK (-0.81), followed by the US, Japan, and Ireland. Nearly all decreases were statistically significant. The only significant increase was a small gain in Korea (+0.15).

Discussion

The declines in student life satisfaction show that declines in well-being of students are not restricted to school-related measures such as school belonging. The possible connection between the two needs to be investigated further by anyone trying to explain the increases in school alienation.

This is especially relevant to Haidt & Twenge, who explain the rise in school alienation by the general effects of smartphone proliferation and time spent online. 

Note: In their Worldwide increases in adolescent loneliness, the authors use the 2018 life satisfaction results to show they correlate with school alienation (at student level). There was, however, no mention of the item being present already on the 2015 PISA, presumably because the authors missed this. Noticing the widespread life satisfaction declines from 2015 to 2018 would have strengthened the argument of the authors that teen well-being declines are not restricted to school environments.

Technical note: The OECD average may include a slightly different set of nations at different times -- e.g. Sweden participated only in 2018 on this item. This is why we look here at change restricted to those countries participating in both years. We use median, rather than mean, as it is less sensitive to outliers and is more relevant when we are interested in causation mechanisms at country unit levels. The result need not, as it did here, equal the change in the OECD average.

To Do: 

Does life satisfaction and school belonging correlate at country level?

Do changes in life satisfaction correlate with increases of school alienation?

Does life satisfaction and time spent online correlate at country level?

Do changes in life satisfaction correlate with increases in time spent online?

Links:

Twenge, Jean M., et al. "Worldwide increases in adolescent loneliness." Journal of Adolescence (2021). [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2021.06.006]

PISA data can be explored at [https://pisadataexplorer.oecd.org/ide/idepisa/] but the site is often down. Raw PISA data in ASCII files is available at [https://www.oecd.org/pisa/data/]. The interface includes the testing for significance.

I placed loneliness results for the 37 OECD countries with 2012 and 2018 PISA data on my site at [https://theshoresofacademia.blogspot.com/p/student-loneliness-data-from-pisa.html].

There is considerable discussion of Life Satisfaction results at <https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/c414e291-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/c414e291-en>.