Scaling the Semantics of Satisfaction

Self-assessed satisfaction is typically measured on an ordinal scale of verbal categories. Here, data from the 1992 Wave 1 of the US Health and Retirement Study (N = 12,654 respondents) are used to investigate whether the boundaries that persons implicitly set between contiguous categories are uniformly set across persons and/or across domains of satisfaction, or are variably sensitive to status characteristics and/or to domain. Analysis demonstrates systematic variations and sensitivities in the semantics of satisfaction. This semantic elasticity affects other estimates in models of self-assessed satisfaction. 3 Tables, 3 Figures, 43 References. Adapted from the source document