Two pandemic years greatly reduced young people’s life satisfaction: evidence from a comparison with pre-COVID-19 panel data

  • How much did young people suffer from the COVID-19 pandemic? A growing number of studies address this question, but they often lack a comparison group that was unaffected by the pandemic, and the observation window is usually short. Here, we compared the 2-year development of life satisfaction of German high school students during COVID-19 (N = 2,698) with the development in prepandemic cohorts (N = 4,834) with a difference-in-differences design. We found a decline in life satisfaction in winter 2020/2021 (Cohen’s d = -0.40) that was approximately three times stronger than that in the general population and persisted until winter 2021/2022. Young people found some restrictions particularly burdensome, especially travel restrictions, bans on cultural events, and the closure of bars/clubs.

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Metadaten
Author:Martin NeugebauerORCiD, Alexander PatzinaORCiD, Hans Dietrich, Malte SandnerORCiD
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcad077
ISSN:0266-7215
Parent Title (English):European Sociological Review
Publisher:Oxford University Press (OUP)
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Reviewed:Begutachtet/Reviewed
Release Date:2024/11/13
Volume:40
Issue:5
Pagenumber:15
First Page:872
Last Page:886
institutes:Fakultät Betriebswirtschaft
Research Themes:Soziale & ökonomische Transformation
Licence (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International
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