Life Satisfaction Across Eight European Countries: An Integrated Analysis of Financial Situation, Personal Relationships, and Time Use Using Eurostat EU-SILC Data (2013, 2018, 2022)

Subjective wellbeing is multidimensional, and satisfaction with financial circumstances, personal relationships, and time use may be interrelated while displaying different temporal, sociodemographic, and contextual patterns. Comparative evidence examining these domains jointly, including their interactions and country-level clustering, remains limited. This study examined variation in financial-situation, personal-relationship, and time-use satisfaction across survey years, education levels, age groups, sexes, and European national contexts. A repeated cross-sectional comparative analysis was conducted using 864 aggregated country–year–education–age–sex cells from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Türkiye in 2013, 2018, and 2022. The data comprised three education levels, six age groups, and female and male categories. Pairwise comparisons between survey years were assessed using independent-samples tests, with Cohen’s d and 95% confidence intervals used to summarize standardized temporal differences. Three weighted partial linear mixed-effects models were estimated, with financial-situation, personal-relationship, and time-use satisfaction serving separately as outcomes. The models included the other two satisfaction domains, education, age, sex, two-way interactions, selected three-way interactions, and random intercepts for country and country–year combinations. Type III tests with Satterthwaite’s approximation assessed overall fixed-effect contributions. Financial-situation satisfaction declined from 2013 to 2018 and gained to approximately its 2013 level from 2018 to 2022, while the 2013 and 2022 levels were not clearly different. Personal-relationship satisfaction was higher in 2018 and 2022 than in 2013, whereas no clear difference was found between 2018 and 2022. Time-use satisfaction showed no statistically clear temporal variation. Temporal effect sizes were generally small. Personal-relationship satisfaction was positively associated with financial-situation satisfaction and was strongly associated with time-use satisfaction. Education, age, and sex made domain-specific contributions, and several domain associations varied across sociodemographic groups, particularly through education-by-age interactions. Marginal (R2) values ranged from 0.628 to 0.807, while conditional (R2) values ranged from 0.953 to 0.965. Financial, relational, and time-use satisfaction were connected but not interchangeable, and their associations varied across demographic and national contexts. Wellbeing monitoring may therefore benefit from considering material, relational, and temporal domains jointly. Because the analysis used aggregated observational data from selected eight countries, causal, individual-level, and Europe-wide conclusions cannot be drawn.