Happiness at Older Agesat older ages. There are, of course, very large variations be-
tween people, so understanding what factors appear to be
associated with greater satisfaction will give us insight into
how to tackle issues of low satisfaction.
Sources of Life- Satisfaction at Older Ages
The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing provides a good
sample with which to explore the relative importance of dif-
ferent factors in determining life- satisfaction at older ages.
The study involves men and women aged 50 and over living
in England, recruited to be representative of the population
in this age range.^6 There are two particular advantages in
analyzing ELSA. First, it is a multidisciplinary study, so it
includes detailed measures in many different domains rel-
evant to life- satisfaction, including economic resources,
physical and mental health, functional capacity, and social
relationships. Second, the longitudinal design with repeated
measures over time means that we can look back over sev-
eral years to see the extent to which changes in experience
over earlier years are associated with life- satisfaction later on.
We showed life- satisfaction at different ages in Figure 9.1.
These ratings were obtained from 5,413 individuals (55%
women) in wave 6 of ELSA, with data collected in 2012.
The average age of respondents was 68 years, ranging from
54 to over 90. Beginning with cross- sectional analyses, our
strategy is to construct a regression model, including dif-
ferent sets of potential correlates of life- satisfaction in an
overall model. We use a Generalized Linear Model (GLM)
approach to allow for categorical as well as continuous ex-
planatory variables. Details of the variables included in these