Expanding the Happiness Paradox: Ethnoracial Disparities in Life Satisfaction Among Older Immigrants in the United States

Background and Purpose: Racial and ethnic minority elders represent the fastest growing segment of the older population (Vincent & Velkoff, 2010). The growing diversity of the older adult population calls for a better understanding of the factors associated with their successful aging. When successful aging is defined by income/wealth and education, and absence of physical and cognitive impairments, older minorities tend to be considered less successful than their non-Hispanic White peers (Cené et al. 2016). However, as previous studies have argued (Calvo, Carr, Matz-Costa, 2016; Mejía, Ryan, González, & Smith, 2017), later-life success may be also defined by individuals’ appraisals of their own well-being, or happiness (Jeste & Palmer, 2013; Angel, 2009). Life satisfaction, a core component of subjective well-being, allows individuals to assess the quality of their lives according to their own standards (Pavot & Diener, 1993).

Prior research has found what might be termed a “happiness paradox” (Calvo et al. 2016) — that older Hispanic immigrants had significantly higher levels of life satisfaction than native-born Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites in the US, despite experiencing the greatest financial disadvantage and the most functional limitations of all groups examined.  This counterintuitive finding is in line the “Hispanic paradox” (Markides & Coreil, 1986), which refers to the observation that older Hispanics in the US tend to have better health outcomes than non-Hispanic Whites despite their limited socioeconomic resources. Given that the Hispanic paradox is believed to stem from cultural and/or social factors specific to immigrants of Hispanic origin, there is a particular need for research that disentangles the interaction between race/ethnicity and nativity status in life satisfaction. In other words, it is unknown whether the “happiness advantage” observed among Hispanics also exists for immigrants from other ethnoracial groups. Disentangling this paradox is the goal of the present research.

Methods: Cross-sectional data from 7,348 respondents aged 60 and older from the 2012/2014 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) were used to estimate linear regression models. Significant interaction effects were tested using adjusted Wald tests. Additionally, to further examine significant moderating effects we calculated marginal probabilities of life satisfaction for the different ethnoracial groups by nativity status holding all other covariates in the model at their mean. We conducted our analyses using Stata SE 14.

Results: Older immigrants experienced higher levels of life satisfaction than comparable native-born individuals. This “happiness advantage” was particularly salient for Hispanic immigrants, who reported the highest levels of life satisfaction of all the groups included in the study. With increasing education, life satisfaction increased for the White and “Other Race” groups, regardless of nativity. However, for both Black groups and native-born Hispanics, higher levels of education were associated with lower life satisfaction

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest that the “happiness paradox” is not only a matter of Hispanic ethnicity but that it may extend to other immigrants as well. Implications for policy and practice concerning successful aging will be discuss.