The Structure of Subjective Well-Being and Its Determinants: A Micro-Data Study for Portugal Elias Soukiazis 1 • Sara Ramos 1 Accepted: 8 March 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract The Subjective Well-Being status has gained a growing research attention in social sciences during the last decades. The attention given by the academic world to this issue has been followed by the community in general. This line of research is still unde- veloped in Portugal, and therefore needs further investigation. The purpose of this study is to analyze the determinants of Life Satisfaction and Happiness, two dimensions of Sub- jective Well-Being of the Portuguese citizens using micro-data from the European Quality of Life Survey. Ordinary Least Squares regressions and Ordinal Logistic models are es- timated to identify the main factors that explain well-being in Portugal. We find that trust in public institutions, satisfaction with material conditions, volunteering activities and employment status have a positive and significant effect on Life Satisfaction. Our evidence also shows that satisfaction with family, satisfaction with material conditions, participation in sport activities, optimism and the marital status are relevant factors in explaining citi- zen’s Happiness in Portugal. The results are similar using Ordinary Least Squares or Maximum Likelihood estimation techniques on ordinal logistic models. Keywords Factor analysis  Happiness  Life satisfaction  Ordinal logit models  Subjective Well-Being 1 Introduction The analysis of the Subjective Well-Being (SWB) is a subject of great importance in the design, application and evaluation of the social and economic policies. In an environment characterized by cultural, social and economic inequalities, these subjects of well-being & Elias Soukiazis elias@fe.uc.pt Sara Ramos ramoss_99@hotmail.com 1 Faculty of Economy, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal 123 Soc Indic Res DOI 10.1007/s11205-015-0938-1