Subjective School Experience and Well-Being during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

School life is an important determinant of adolescents’ subjective well-being. While there is now an extensive literature on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents’ well-being, adolescents’ school experience during the pandemic and how it relates to different dimensions of their subjective well-being has received little attention. This study addresses this gap by examining the relationship between young people’s school experience and their cognitive and affective subjective well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic in Luxembourg. We rely on a unique two-wave panel dataset that contains granular information about young people’s lives shortly after the onset of the pandemic in July 2020 and one year later in July 2021. Our study extends the current scientific knowledge on the COVID-19 pandemic by highlighting that while school experience has a weak relationship with affective subjective well-being (i.e., happiness), it is strongly associated with cognitive subjective well-being (i.e., life satisfaction), particularly one year after the pandemic outbreak for those with more negative feelings about school. Our study also reveals that our results on cognitive well-being are stratified by social status.