Life Satisfaction in Russian Primary Schoolchildren: Links with Personality and Family Environment

The present study aimed to investigate life satisfaction and its relations to family environment and child personality in a large community sample of Russian primary schoolchildren aged 7–10 years (N = 705, 51% female). Children completed Huebner’s Student’s Life Satisfaction scale; parents reported about family background and completed the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire-Brief Form, the Self Reporting Questionnaire measuring parental stress and the Inventory of Child Individual Differences-Short version measuring the Big Five and fifteen lower-order personality traits. Gender accounted for less than 2% of the variance in life satisfaction, with girls scoring higher than boys, the effect of age was not significant. Child life satisfaction was positively related to parental education, income and family cohesion, and was negatively related to domestic violence, parental stress, corporal punishment and poor supervision. It was associated with all Big Five personality traits; correlations with the extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness domains were positive, whereas correlation with the neuroticism domain was negative. Correlations with lower-order traits were generally smaller; those with sociability and openness to experience were not significant. Multiple regression analysis indicated that family income, low parental stress and supervision together with low neuroticism and conscientiousness were significantly and independently associated with child life satisfaction, accounting for 14–15% of the total variance.