The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on life satisfaction has been a topic of worldwide research, mostly indicating a drop in individual’s life satisfaction with some differences between subgroups. However, literature on related mechanisms is scarce. This study examines whether the sense of social belonging is a mechanism that explains pandemic-related changes in life satisfaction across different age groups. Using a rich longitudinal data set of the adult cohort of the German National Educational Panel Study and employing fixed effects panel regression models, we show that the COVID-19 pandemic is, on average, negatively associated with individual life satisfaction and social belonging. Yet, mediation and sensitivity analysis questions the general importance of social belonging as a relevant mechanism irrespective of individuals’ age. The results also suggest that the negative effects of the pandemic on social belonging were indeed significant for individuals with average or high pre-pandemic social belonging, while individuals with low pre-pandemic social belonging experienced an increase in their sense of social belonging. This leads to an expanded discussion of which groups of people are most affected by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and what other mechanisms can be hypothesized to explain this negative impact on people's life satisfaction.

COVID-19 大流行对生活满意度的影响一直是全球研究的话题，主要表明个人的生活满意度下降，亚组之间存在一些差异。然而，关于相关机制的文献很少。本研究考察了社会归属感是否是一种解释不同年龄组生活满意度与大流行相关的变化的机制。使用德国国家教育面板研究成人队列的丰富纵向数据集并采用固定效应面板回归模型，我们表明 COVID-19 大流行平均而言与个人生活满意度和社会归属呈负相关。然而，中介和敏感性分析质疑了社会归属作为一种相关机制的普遍重要性，而与个人的年龄无关。结果还表明，大流行对社会归属感的负面影响对于大流行前社会归属感平均或较高的个体确实很重要，而大流行前社会归属感低的个体的社会归属感有所增加。这导致了对哪些人群受 COVID-19 大流行影响最大以及可以假设哪些其他机制来解释这种对人们生活满意度的负面影响的广泛讨论。