On October 2 in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health, Steve Haake from Sheffield Hallam University and colleagues published a model for evaluating life satisfaction. They demonstrate their model using participants in a weekly running event as a case study, finding that increases in health, especially mental health, most strongly predict improvements in life satisfaction.
In the UK, where the study was conducted, the average life satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10 is 7.5, as last measured in 2024. Personality is the most significant factor for a person's life satisfaction, but many other factors that are more variable over time—such as relationship status or economic conditions—also influence how people feel about their lives. Health is another major contributor to a person's general feelings of wellbeing, and thus the researchers aimed to evaluate how regularly participating in communal physical activity increases ratings of life satisfaction.
The study focused on participants of a free, weekly 5k event called Parkrun, over 78,000 of whom responded to a survey about their life satisfaction. The survey included questions about other factors that can influence someone's sense of fulfillment, including general health status and activity levels both before and throughout their participation in Parkrun events. The researchers matched these survey responses to almost a million participants who had done at least one parkrun in the previous 12 months.
A sense of improved health was most closely tied to increases in life satisfaction. The majority of Parkrun participants were already highly active and rated their health as "good" or "very good." However, when the researchers looked at individuals who rated their health as "very bad" at the start of their participation in Parkrun, they found that these people had much greater capacity to improve their increases in life satisfaction compared to people who initially viewed their health as "good."
While physical health also had significant effects, the biggest changes in life satisfaction were related to mental health. The survey asked participants about their happiness, general mental wellbeing, and feelings of personal achievement and fun. Higher ratings of these responses were most closely related to growing life satisfaction.
The researchers were also able to measure differences for variables not affected by participation in the activity, such as age and gender. Age has a non-linear relationship with life satisfaction, being the lowest in early middle age, and older people were more likely to report a sense of improvement in life satisfaction. This was also true of women compared to men.
In addition to the health and life satisfaction benefits, the estimated economic benefits of parkrun to the UK economy were estimated to be £668m. This included £75m for the number of runs or walks completed (£1.92 per run or walk per person), £132m for the increase in activity after participation, and £463m for an estimated improvement to health status of 3% (found in a previous study).
Not only can these data inform public health measures, such as organized physical activity, but this study presents a model for evaluating changes to life satisfaction that can be more broadly applied.
The authors add: "Our previous paper showed that life satisfaction increased for those participating in parkrun - what we didn't know was how parkrun 'worked'. This new paper has given us an answer to this question: health status, increases in activity level and the pleasure from cumulative parkruns. Rather than the physical aspects of parkrun, it is the improvements to mental health that are most important, things like happiness, a sense of personal achievement and having fun. Importantly, we now have a model that we can use for any public health initiative, even if it's not related to health. In a world of limited resources, the model is a useful way of working out which initiatives are most effective."
In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Global Public Health: http://plos.io/4nh1DYu
Citation: Haake S, Hext A, Benkowitz C (2025) A generic model of life satisfaction: The case study of parkrun. PLOS Glob Public Health 5(10): e0005065. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0005065
Author Countries: United Kingdom
Funding: The survey was funded by parkrun Global (University grant number N940); the principal investigator was AH, the co-investigator was SH. The grant was used to fund CB to carry out the survey. parkrun supported the data collection (as reported in the text) by sending out links for the survey to participants and matching, with consent, surveys to participant data held by them. parkrun had no role in study design, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
