Gottfredson, N C, et al. --- "Identifying predictors of law student life satisfaction" [2009] LegEdDig 39; (2009) 17(3) Legal Education Digest 32

• Identifying predictors of law student life satisfaction

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Identifying predictors of law student life satisfaction

N. Gottfredson, A. Panter, C. Daye, W. Allen, L. Wightman, and M. Deo

58 J. Legal Educ. 2008, pp520–530.

Compared to the US population, law students are at greater risk for stress-related health disorders. However, law students have the potential to experience a high degree of meaningful engagement with their work, to feel a sense of community involvement and support, and to feel proud of their achievements. Based on prior well-being research, it was predicted that engagement, social support, and perceptions of academic success would relate to enhanced satisfaction with life for a national sample of law students. Findings from a multilevel regression analysis revealed that smaller, more diverse law schools with higher quality instruction and class discussion were most conducive to life satisfaction. Students who felt supported by their academic and home communities and students who were academically successful were the most satisfied with their lives.

Law students are, on average, far more stressed, anxious, and depressed than the general population. However, research has shown that feelings of empowerment and efficacy, belonging to a tight-knit community, and being engaged in meaningful work are all prominent predictors of life satisfaction.

Life satisfaction is not synonymous with positive mental health outcomes; the most stressed law students may also be the most fulfilled. In this article, we expand the study of well-being by investigating the predictors of life satisfaction in a population of highly motivated but stressed individuals: law students. Law students are an unusual group because they self-select into academically challenging and competitive environments that have immediate costs, yet these situations potentially lead to economic, social, and personal rewards.

The five-item Satisfaction with Life scale was created to assess satisfaction with life as a whole, with the intention of allowing individuals to weigh and integrate factors subjectively into a global satisfaction score. The items on the Satisfaction with Life scale are: ‘In most ways my life is close to my ideal’; ‘The conditions in my life are excellent’; ‘I am satisfied with my life’; ‘So far I have gotten the important things I want in life’; and ‘If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing’. Satisfaction with Life is based on personal, cultural, and time-varying beliefs and values and is thus naturally differentially predicted across lifespan and cultures. Although the factors influencing life satisfaction vary over the lifespan, satisfaction levels have been linked most reliably to stable personality traits. Specifically, more extraverted and emotionally stable individuals tend to experience higher life satisfaction.

Life satisfaction can be partially explained by perceived meaningfulness of work. People who believe they are involved in meaningful endeavours have much higher life satisfaction than people who do not have this perception. A related result is that people who have more self-efficacy report greater life satisfaction. It would be expected, then, that law students would be more satisfied with their lives if they perceived their studies as meaningful and if they viewed themselves as having a higher sense of self-efficacy in the academic area of law. Because self-efficacy is a strong predictor of satisfaction with life and because the atmosphere of law schools is competitive, academic success should be highly related to self-efficacy and will thus predict satisfaction with life.

People who feel that they are part of a community have stronger life satisfaction. Thus, a law student who feels close to other students in his or her law school or who has positive relationships with faculty members can be expected to have more life satisfaction than an individual with neutral or negative relationships. Furthermore, single students can be expected to have less satisfaction than married or cohabiting students because their social support is, on average, not as strong, as one study shows.

Academic success should act as a proxy for self-efficacy such that students who are more successful in law school will be happier than less successful students. Finally, previous findings related to personality (i.e, more life satisfaction for extraverted and emotional stable individuals) and demographic characteristics (i.e, more life satisfaction for women and non-racial minorities) that exist in the general population should hold for law students.

National data were collected from law students by a multisite, interdisciplinary team of researchers working on the Educational Diversity Project (EDP) study during law school orientation in Fall 2004, and student participants were again contacted in Spring 2007, as they were expected to be completing law school. Web-based surveys were conducted through Qualtrics®, an online survey software program. Institutional characteristics of the schools were provided by the American Bar Association (ABA) on law schools, and student self-reported race/ethnicity, Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) scores, gender, and age were confirmed using information from the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) database.

Baseline participants in the sample were 6,100 incoming law school students from 50 nationally representative, ABA-approved, accredited US law schools. Schools in this sample were drawn using two methods. EDP investigators oversampled schools that were identified as having very high minority populations (N = 7), and randomly drew 46 schools from the remaining 177 ABA-approved law schools. Of these schools, one was ineligible to participate and two were non-responsive, resulting in a sample of 50 law schools. All incoming students in the selected schools were asked to participate. Of the schools with high minority representations, average student response rates were 75.5 per cent (Mdn = 82.8 per cent); student response rates at the remaining schools averaged 51.8 per cent (Mdn = 54.0). Higher response rates in the former are partially attributable to administration method; all students in the high minority representation sample completed surveys during orientation, while schools in the other sample included students who completed the surveys during orientation and others who took surveys home with them. Sampling weights were constructed based on the probability of sampling at the school and individual level, and for non-response. Almost all of the respondents who agreed to have their surveys matched with LSAC databases (99.7 per cent) were successfully matched to the databases containing verified self-reported student information (LSAT scores and undergraduate institution attended). Of the 5,213 participants who were successfully matched to the database, at the time of data analysis, 393 students could not be re-contacted due to invalid email addresses. Out of the remaining participants, 57.8 per cent were followed up by the EDP research team: 515 students were confirmed to have left law school prior to Spring 2007, and 2,274 completed the follow-up survey.

Life Satisfaction Diener et al’s five-item Satisfaction with Life scale was used to assess law student well-being. The average of the five items, each ranging from one to five, created an approximately normally distributed outcome variable ranging from one to five. Responses for each item ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The internal consistency of this index, as indicated by Cronbach’s X, is .84, consistent with past work with this measure. Law students had an average life satisfaction score of 3.28 (sd = .79), which is slightly lower than the average satisfaction score for college students (mean = 3.36, sd = .92 as reported in Diener et al, after scale transformation.

School characteristics. Institutional characteristics included school sector (public and private), student enrolment, per cent of applicants admitted, and racial diversity. Racial diversity was measured by the Racial Diversity Index (RDI) that approaches zero for a completely homogenous school and approaches one for a completely heterogeneous school. The higher the RDI, the more racially/ethnically diverse the school.

Individual demographic characteristics and personality. Age, gender, relative childhood income (rated on a five point scale: 1 (income was much less than other families) to 5 (income was much greater than other families), race/ethnicity (African American, Asian American, Mexican/Hispanic, Multiracial, and White), self-reported confidence in social situations (a facet of extraversion, measured at baseline on a five-point ordinal scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree)), self-reported emotional stability (also measured at baseline on a five-point ordinal agreement scale), and self-reported openness to experience (a composite of nine five-point ordinal items taken from Goldberg’s International Personality Item Pool) were included as demographic background variables.

Social support. Social support was measured by four facets: (a) the presence of the student’s biological father during childhood (dichotomous). Fathers were used instead of mothers due to the low frequency of biological mother absence; (b) marriage/cohabitation at baseline assessment (dichotomous); (c) a four-point ordinal rating of quality of friendships developed during law school at follow up ranging from 1 (poor) to 4 (excellent); and (d) a four-point ordinal rating of quality of student-faculty relationships in law school ranging from 1 (poor) to 4 (excellent).

Perceived academic efficacy. Variables related to academic success and self-efficacy are LSAT score, expected class rank at baseline (six response options from bottom quarter to top five per cent), expectation to pass the bar examination at follow up (in increments of 10 from 0 to 100 per cent certainty), and indication of academic struggle during law school: 0 (did not struggle academically during law school) or 1 (struggled academically during law school).

Engagement with/meaningfulness of course material. At follow up students rated the quality of the instruction that they received in their courses, the quality of their extracurricular options, and the quality of class discussions using a scale ranging from 1 (poor) to 4 (excellent).

Law students were sampled within law schools. The intra-class correlation (ICC) for life satisfaction is about .01, indicating that students who attend the same school have a very small, but not absent, interdependence in terms of their life satisfaction.

Because the Benjamini-Hochberg correction was used, standard p-values were not reported but instead results were categorised as significant or non-significant (a = .05) according to the more stringent Benjamini Hochberg criterion.

School characteristics. Students who attended more racially diverse schools were significantly more satisfied with their lives (B = .49; SE = .19), while students attending larger schools had less life satisfaction (B = -.o09; SE = .07; enrolment in thousands). School sector and selectivity were not significantly related to life satisfaction.

Individual demographic characteristics and personality. Most demographic characteristics were significantly related to life satisfaction. Older law students reported being less satisfied than younger students (B = -.26; SE = .04; square root of age), males reported being less satisfied than females (B = -.19; SE=.04), and students who had relatively higher family income during childhood had higher life satisfaction (B = .02; SE = .02). As expected given past research on personality and well-being, extraverted (B = .13; SE = .02) and emotionally stable (B = .11; SE = .02) students also reported more life satisfaction than introverts and less emotionally stable students. Law students who reported higher on openness to experience had very slightly lower life satisfaction (B = -.01; SE = .00). African American students reported significantly less life satisfaction than all others (B = -.24; SE = .11; relative to White students) and Asian American students reported significantly more life satisfaction relative to White students (B = .14; SE = .08). There were no significant differences between Mexican/Hispanic students and White students or Multi-racial students and White students.

Social support. All measures of social support were significantly related to life satisfaction. Married or cohabiting students (B = .31; SE = .04), students whose biological fathers were present during childhood (B = .23; SE = .07), students who reported developing quality friendships during law school (B = .02; SE = .02), and students who reported better relationships with faculty (B =.03; SE = .02) all reported significantly greater life satisfaction than single students, students whose biological fathers were absent during childhood, students with lower-quality friendships, and students who had poorer relationships with faculty members.

Perceived academic efficacy. Students with higher LSAT scores were significantly less satisfied than students with lower LSAT scores (B = -.14; SE = .04).

Interestingly, the effect of LSAT scores was in the opposite direction of the other academic success variables. Students who reported a higher likelihood of passing the bar exam as they were finishing law school had significantly higher life satisfaction (B = .07; SE = .02). Likewise, students who reported struggling during law school reported lower life satisfaction (B = -.21; SE = .05). The baseline measure of expected class rank had significant association with reported life satisfaction at follow up.

Engagement with/meaningfulness of course material. Student-reported perceived quality of instruction (B = .1; SE = .03) and perceived quality of class discussions (B = .04; SE = .03) were both positively related to life satisfaction. Ratings about the perceived quality of extracurricular options during law school were not significantly predictive of life satisfaction.

The aim of this study was to discern whether the law students have similar life satisfaction in response to environmental covariates known to affect the general population, and whether the same demographic relationships with life satisfaction hold in this sample. Our results confirmed that the demographic predictors of life satisfaction that hold in the general population were consistent predictors for this highly educated, national sample of law students. Gender predicted about a fifth of point increase in reported life satisfaction. Race/ethnicity predicted life satisfaction somewhat, with African American law students reporting the lowest satisfaction (controlling for childhood income, family structure, discrimination, and academic success). Asian American students reported the highest life satisfaction. Family income during childhood had no relationship to life satisfaction, presumably because students in law schools have enough resources to have their basic needs met. Just as in the general population, emotional stability and extraversion moderately related to life satisfaction.

The most satisfied law students were those who experienced an appropriate level of challenge, consistent with the concept of ‘flow’. An optimally functioning individual would succeed academically (contributing to greater self-efficacy) and would have a sense of engagement with their school and with their work. Perceived academic success in law school positively related to life satisfaction, but LSAT scores slightly negatively related to life satisfaction. This discrepancy suggests that one’s ability level, as assessed by standardised admissions tests, does not predict life satisfaction but instead, the rewards gained through hard work and engagement with the material predicts life satisfaction.

This sense of engagement is further bolstered by the social support of family, faculty, and peers. Law school characteristics (smaller size, racial diversity, perceived quality of instruction, and class discussions) contributed to law student satisfaction by fostering a sense of community involvement.

Of note, average life satisfaction for law students was lower than the average life satisfaction found in Dieneret al’s construction sample of college students. This lower average can be explained in part by the law students’ context when self-reporting their life satisfaction: they were in their last semester/quarter of law school and in the period immediately prior to having to prepare for the bar examination. In the context of self-determination theory (SDT), Deci and Ryan discussed the importance of allowing students to feel autonomous and intrinsically motivated. Perhaps the case is that during law school, students do not feel self-determining, and question their competencies. Evidence from this study supports these ideas – students who felt engaged in lectures and in class discussions were more satisfied, and students who had expectations to pass the bar examination and who said that law school was not a struggle were more satisfied that those who reported feeling otherwise.

Several findings could guide future research. For example, law school racial diversity significantly predicted greater life satisfaction, controlling for several important predictors including openness to experience. This finding suggests that racially diverse environments, combined with academic challenge, give rise to positive perceptions of one’s own satisfaction. This study could not determine whether satisfied students choose racially diverse environments or whether the racially diverse environments contribute to a student’s perceived life satisfaction.

School climate matters. A more supportive atmosphere with positive student-student and student-faculty relationships, and a more diverse student body, leads to higher levels of student satisfaction. Such supportive environments will also reduce the possibility that students encounter micro-aggressions (everyday experiences of implicit or explicit discrimination).

It is also important that students perceive their class discussions and lectures as being high quality. Students who attend smaller schools are more satisfied than those attending larger schools. This may be due to a combination of factors, including a sense of community and support, and perceived quality of classes. Reducing class size, while potentially costly, might attenuate some of the differences in satisfaction levels across students in small and large schools.