Two pandemic years greatly reduced young people’s life satisfaction: evidence from a comparison with pre-COVID-19 panel data.

Beschreibung

How much did young people suffer from the COVID-19 pandemic? A growing number of studies address this question, but they often lack a comparison group that was unaffected by the pandemic, and the observation window is usually short. Here, we compared the 2-year development of life satisfaction of German high school students during COVID-19 (N?=?2,698) with the development in prepandemic cohorts (N?=?4,834) with a difference-in-differences design. We found a decline in life satisfaction in winter 2020/2021 (Cohen’s d?=?-0.40) that was approximately three times stronger than that in the general population and persisted until winter 2021/2022. Young people found some restrictions particularly burdensome, especially travel restrictions, bans on cultural events, and the closure of bars/clubs.

Zitationshinweis

Neugebauer M., Patzina A., Dietrich H., & Sandner M. (2023). Two pandemic years greatly reduced young people’s life satisfaction: evidence from a comparison with pre-COVID-19 panel data. European Sociological Review (online first). https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcad077