College of Engineering, American University of the Middle East, Egaila, Kuwait.
Public Health Registrar, South London, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2018 Jun 13;13(6):e0198638. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0198638. eCollection 2018.
Financial status is thought to be an important determinant of psychological well-being. We investigate this relationship, and the effect of other factors, using a parametric mixed modelling approach for panel data, controlling the problem of unobservable heterogeneity. Two nationally representative surveys, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the Understanding Society Survey (USS), were used to construct a unified data set which measured psychological well-being and associated factors using the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12). The GHQ-12 score for the head of the household was used as the dependant variable and its relationship with multiple independent demographic and financial status variables was investigated. Following assessment of growth curve characteristics with linear, curvilinear and higher-order polynomial modelling; several variance-covariance structures were tested to assess the error covariance structure of the longitudinal data. The random intercept and random slope were allowed to vary across participants, and methods such as natural splines and B-splines were used to improve the fit of some variables. Our final model demonstrated the most important variables affecting self-reported psychological well-being, as determined by GHQ-12, were perception and expectation of future financial situation and problems meeting household expenditure. Gender, age, marital status, number of children at home, highest qualification and job status were also significantly implicated. Unlike previous studies however we did not find that size of income was significant. These results provide further strong evidence of the impact that financial concerns have on self-reported measures of psychological well-being.
财务状况被认为是心理幸福感的一个重要决定因素。我们使用参数混合建模方法研究了这种关系，以及其他因素的影响，该方法控制了不可观测异质性的问题。我们使用了两个具有全国代表性的调查，即英国家庭面板调查（BHPS）和社会理解调查（USS），构建了一个统一的数据集合，使用 12 项一般健康问卷（GHQ-12）来衡量心理幸福感和相关因素。家庭户主的 GHQ-12 得分被用作因变量，其与多个独立的人口统计学和财务状况变量的关系得到了研究。在对线性、曲线和更高阶多项式模型的增长曲线特征进行评估后；测试了几种方差协方差结构，以评估纵向数据的误差协方差结构。允许参与者的随机截距和随机斜率有所不同，并且使用自然样条和 B 样条等方法来改进某些变量的拟合度。我们的最终模型展示了对自我报告的心理幸福感（由 GHQ-12 确定）影响最大的最重要变量，这些变量是对未来财务状况的感知和预期以及家庭支出的问题。性别、年龄、婚姻状况、在家中的孩子数量、最高学历和工作状况也有显著影响。然而，与之前的研究不同，我们没有发现收入规模的重要性。这些结果进一步有力地证明了财务问题对自我报告的心理幸福感衡量指标的影响。
