ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, that hit the world in 2020, on the social media indexes of subjective well-being previously discussed in the book. While some indicators only show negative peaks for a very short time, the new index proposed in this book seems to indicate that a prolonged stress condition can indeed impact the structural component of the subjective well-being. In particular, it is shown, through time-series analysis, that the level of subjective-well being dropped dramatically both in Japan and Italy with the start of the pandemic and then remains persistently low for quite a long time. At the time this writing it is not possible to evaluate how much time it will be required to recover the pre-pandemic well-being levels.
Through a data science approach, it is also shown that the complexity of the well-being can be captured only through a dynamical analysis that shows which mix of factors can explain or impact the subjective well-being through time. Finally, a structural equation model is applied again to attempt some causal analysis on the determinants of subjective well-being as measured by our SNS indicators.
