Adaptation to disability - evidence from the UK household longitudinal study

Do people adapt to disability? Little work has examined hedonic adaptation to disability, especially by looking at physical and mental disability separately. This study is the first to investigate the effect of physical, mental, and general disability on subjective well-being (SWB) and focus on the phenomenon of hedonic adaptation, conditional on an observed reduction in SWB at onset of disability, and its heterogeneity across age at onset and gender. Using a fixed effects (FE) lag model, this study analyses data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) 2009-2018. The main sample in this study is restricted to only those individuals who reported a drop in SWB at onset. Furthermore, the analysis looks at heterogeneity across genders and age at onset. The results show that mental disability has larger negative impacts on SWB than physical disability. There is evidence of partial adaptation (20% to 80%) to both physical and mental disability at three years or more after onset conditional on an observed reduction in SWB at onset. Regarding adaptation after onset, across most age groups, there is no evidence for adaptation to disability. The exception is the youngest onset group, which partially adapt to general disability after three or more years after onset. There appears to be no difference in hedonic adaptation to physical and mental disability by gender.