Investigating the Macro Determinants of Self-Rated Health and Well-Being Using the European Social Survey: Methodological Innovations across Countries and Time

At present, there is a debate over the relative importance and contribution of household income to well-being, and the link between economic growth, welfare, and well-being is not fully understood. We sought to examine how changes in contextual and individual income (spanning the Great Recession) are associated with changes in self-reported well-being in the European Social Survey (ESS) 2002–2011. A multivariate multilevel analysis was performed on 237,253 individuals nested within 128 country cohorts covering 30 countries. In this article, we focus specifically on the analysis and some of the methodological challenges and issues faced when making international comparisons across nations and time.