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What Importance? Importance Weighting and Subjective Well-Being

  • Original Research
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Journal of Well-Being Assessment

Abstract

Using an individual’s perceived importance of various life domains (such as health, finances, and family life) as a weighting factor in measures of subjective well-being (SWB) is commonly known as importance weighting. Although importance weighting seems intuitively appealing, empirical evidence for importance weighting in the SWB literature has been mixed. As a result, some researchers call for abandoning importance weighting completely without considering potential factors contributing to the mixed findings. Several factors that can contribute to the mixed findings have been identified in previous research, but the possibility of different types of domain importance has yet to be explored. The current study compared the performance of importance weighting based on different wordings of the domain importance questions in the context of SWB. Analyzing data from an online survey of 884 residents of Shanghai, China, we found that the wording of the domain importance questions could affect the performance of importance weighting. Our findings signify that it is too premature to call for abandoning importance weighting completely without carefully considering all the potential factors contributing to the mixed results (including the possibility of more than one type of domain importance).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1040 West Harrison Street (MC 309), Chicago, IL, 60607-7134, USA

    Chang-ming Hsieh

  2. Xi’An Jiaotong University City College, Xi’an, China

    Qiguang Li

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  1. Chang-ming Hsieh
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  2. Qiguang Li
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Correspondence to Chang-ming Hsieh.

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Appendices

Appendix 1a

Table 5 Correlations of composite satisfactoin scores with global subjective well-being measures (N = 513)
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Appendix 1b

Table 6 Results of moderated regression analysis on domain importance “to You” (N = 513)
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Appendix 1c

Table 7 Results of Moderated Regression Analysis on Domain Importance “to Your Life Satisfaction” (N = 513)
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Appendix 2

Table 8 Correlations between primary study variables
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Hsieh, Cm., Li, Q. What Importance? Importance Weighting and Subjective Well-Being. J well-being assess 3, 59–74 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41543-019-00020-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41543-019-00020-1

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