Educational Status and the Structure of Subjective Well-Being in Men and Women

This study used confirmatory factor analysis with national survey data to explore how educational status affects the criteria men and women use to evaluate their subjective well-being. A recently developed six-factor model of subjective mental health (Bryant and Veroff, 1984) was used to evaluate separately the educational differences in the structure of well-being for men and women. Although the structure of women's self-evaluations did not differ significantly according to educational status, college-educated men structured their self-evaluations differently than did either grade schoolor high school-educated men. Specifically, college-educated men expressedfeelings of vulnerability and reactions to stress in more psychological terms, such as feelings of nervous breakdown and anxiety, whereas grade schooland high school-educated men defined these judgments more exclusively in terms of physical symptoms. In addition, dissatisfaction and self-doubt were more indicative of uncertainty toward the future among college-educated men than among either grade schoolor high school-educated men. It is argued that college may sensitize men to mental health issues and may thereby broaden the realm of psychological criteria that they consider relevant for their self-evaluations. Because women, in contrast, may already be sensitive to these issues due to sex-role socialization, higher education may have relatively little structural impact on their subjective well-being and may instead influence other aspects of adjustment.