Sociodemographic Variation in Suffering: A Cross-National Analysis With 22 Countries

BackgroundSuffering has been identified as an important public health issue worthy of closer attention. This preregistered study takes an initial step toward developing an epidemiology of suffering by exploring the distribution of suffering in 22 countries and testing for sociodemographic disparities in suffering.MethodsUsing nationally representative data from the first wave of the Global Flourishing Study (N = 202,898), we estimated the proportion of people who endorsed ‘some/a lot’ of suffering in each country. Variation in proportions of suffering across the categories of 9 sociodemographic characteristics (age, gender, marital status, employment status, years of education, immigration status, frequency of religious service attendance, religious affiliation, racial/ethnic identity) were estimated separately for each country. We aggregated country-level estimates of suffering for specific sociodemographic categories using random effects meta-analyses.ResultsThe proportion of country-specific populations experiencing suffering varied considerably, ranging from .24 (Poland) to .60 (Türkiye). Country-level results provided evidence of cross-national heterogeneity in suffering for all sociodemographic categories, although variation was greater for some categories than others. Meta-analytic results supported differences in suffering based on marital status, employment status, and years of education across the countries, with the highest suffering observed among those who had separated from their spouse, were either unemployed and looking for a job or otherwise unemployed for reasons unknown, and had 8 or fewer years of education.ConclusionsSuffering varies across countries and sociodemographic categories. Our findings lay the foundation for population-level monitoring of suffering and a population health agenda to address suffering among vulnerable subpopulations.