The Advantages of Analysing Longitudinal Data for Understanding Changes in Levels of Life Satisfaction

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2022 provides a natural experiment of a scale rarely seen in modern times. Apart from the impact of the pandemic on health and health systems, the social and economic consequences continue to play out. Governments were forced to embrace budget deficits to maintain social and economic stability as the restrictions they imposed to limit the spread of the virus resulted in dramatic changes to the everyday lives of millions of people. Consequently, the pandemic affected everyone in every country regardless of whether or not they actually contracted the virus. For this session, we invite papers focusing on changes in levels of life satisfaction before, during and after the pandemic. Papers may report the results of analysis of longitudinal data from panel surveys or the results of cross-sectional data collected during different time periods to compare cohorts over time.