Global Reversal of Income-Related Trends in Adolescent Life Satisfaction: Gender-Stratified Analysis of Programme for
1Bay Area School of Applied Psychological Sciences, Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, Zhuhai, China; Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, National Demonstration Center for Experimental Psychology Education, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Purpose:
Adolescent life satisfaction is a key indicator of subjective well-being and a predictor of long-term health outcomes, yet recent global trends show worrying declines. This study investigates how gender and national wealth interact to shape trends in adolescent life satisfaction from 2015 to 2022.
Methods:
We analyzed three repeated cross-sectional Programme for International Student Assessment cycles (2015, 2018, and 2022) including 1,366,743 adolescents across 73, 80, and 80 participating countries, respectively.
Results:
Global life satisfaction declined from a mean of 7.38 (standard deviation [SD]: 2.29) in 2015 to 6.99 (SD: 2.60) in 2022 (Wald χ2 = 489.95, p < .001). The gender gap widened from 0.31 to 0.60 points (Wald χ2 = 758.02, p < .001) during this period, largely due to a 0.33-point decline among females (95% confidence interval [CI] -0.36 to -0.29). Adolescents in high-income countries fell from second to last in income-based rankings (Wald χ2 = 1,578.25, p < .001); by 2022, lower-middle-income adolescents reported 0.42 points (95% CI 0.40-0.45) higher life satisfaction than high-income peers. A significant three-way interaction (Wald χ2 = 78.21, p < .001) revealed sharply widening gender gaps in high- and upper-middle-income groups, mainly due to post-2018 declines among females (Δ = -0.39 and -0.63). By 2022, girls in lower-middle-income countries scored 0.73 points (95% CI 0.70-0.77) higher than those in high-income countries.
Discussion:
Adolescent life satisfaction declined globally between 2015 and 2022, with substantial heterogeneity by gender and country-income category. These findings support subgroup-specific monitoring and hypothesis-driven follow-up studies on contextual determinants.
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