Understanding the association between education and wellbeing: an exploration of the Gallup World Poll

Abstract

Antecedents of wellbeing across different socio-cultural contexts is a question that psychologists and other social scientist continue to grapple with. Although evidence supporting higher educational levels as being beneficial for wellbeing is significant, there are still contradictory findings, necessitating further exploration into this relationship. Moreover, current evidence seems to focus mostly on data derived from Western samples and have adopted limited measures of wellbeing. The present study explores the relationship between schooling and a subset of 31 wellbeing-related categories in the Gallup World Poll conducted over three years (2020–2022), encompassing 386,654 individuals in 142 countries. The findings indicate that overall participants with higher levels of education fare better than those with lower levels of education. However, disaggregation and comparison across key social indicators, specifically, country/region of residence, sex and age showed that there were instances where higher levels of education were less beneficial for wellbeing. While acknowledging the importance of education for wellbeing, our findings suggest the need to consider how unique socio-cultural factors might further complicate the benefits of education. We also suggest that governments might need to consider what policies are necessary to make the benefits of education more apparent and ubiquitous.