Preparing for an Aging World The Case for Cross-National Research (2001) / Chapter Skim
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7. Well-Being: Concepts and Measures
7. Well-Being: Concepts and Measures
Pages 250-275
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From page 250... ...
have called the latter stages of the 20th century a time of structural lag, in which national policies and institutions have failed to keep pace with gains in longevity and health. The nature of employment and retirement, the place of education in the life course, and the structures for providing medical care have yet to catch up with the facts of octogenarian life expectancy, decades of life after usual retirement, and vigorous capability into genuine old age.
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From page 251... ...
As these topics suggest, the 1969 report included some direct measures of well-being health and illness, for example and a number of economic and behavioral factors assumed to cause or enable well-being. Throughout the following decade, interest in the measurement of wellbeing ran high in many countries as part of a larger effort at creating "social indicators." The social indicators movement, as it was called, appears in retrospect to have been part of a larger international concern with well-being and the role of governments in its achievement.
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From page 252... ...
WHOQOL-100 consists of six main sections: physical health, psychological health, level of independence, social relations, environment, and spirituality. Most of the questions within these sections ask for responses in terms of satisfaction or dissatisfaction on a five-point scale ranging from very satisfied to very dissatisfied.
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From page 253... ...
conditions (e.g., income, neighborhood, · Subjective well-being (e.g., self-reports of satisfaction/dissatisfac· Persistent mood level (e.g., optimism/pessimism) · Immediate pleasures/pains, transient emotional states (e.g., joy, · Biochemical, neural bases of behavior The conceptual distinction that Kahneman and colleagues propose between objective (external)
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From page 254... ...
Countries lowest in reported well-being were those in eastern Europe, in which many people were suffering both low income and recent severe reductions in income. Unaccustomed poverty adds to the fact of objective deprivation a sense of loss and the unavoidable comparison with an earlier and more prosperous time.
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From page 255... ...
WELL-BEING: CONCEPTS AND MEASURES 160 140 120 (n , 1 00 Oh o 80 Q He 60 40 20 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0 6.0 Subjective Well-Being 255 tom 1.5 1 2.5 1 3.5 1 4.5 1 5.5 6.5 7.5 7.0 8.0 . '''''-''''1'''' 8.5 FIGURE 7-1 Subjective well-being scores in 45 nations.
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From page 256... ...
First are the measures of external objective conditions, such as personal income growth, neighborhood characteristics, housing status, lon
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From page 257... ...
These measures were originally designed to supplement the conventional measures of societal progress reflected by developments in the economic sphere growth rate of GNP, level of investment and saving, distribution of income, level of consumption, and the like. To the extent that these supplemental objective conditions have an impact on well-being that is not reflected in the standard economic variables, they provide a richer and broader picture of societal well-being.
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From page 258... ...
passes much of what is usually characterized as the subjective well-being literature. Studies in this area include not only the global satisfaction measures associated with various aspects of people's lives such as their income; their neighborhood; and their relationships with their children, their spouse, and other family members but also research focused on human development and mental health.
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From page 259... ...
had noted earlier, the use of such questions assumes that the varied experiences of a person's life somehow combine to produce a global state of well-being or its lack, that a person's sense and level of well-being are relatively stable rather than a labile response to transient events, that people are able to describe their state of well-being to an interviewer, and
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From page 260... ...
These include an assimilation effect, when some happy incident comes to mind and heightens the feeling of life satisfaction; and a contrast effect, when a happy event of the past is somehow used as a standard of comparison for present feelings and thus reduces the overall sense of well-being. Similar elevations or reductions in answering the well-being question may reflect transient moods, evoked by events of the moment.
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From page 261... ...
It begins with a question about overall health, on a five-point scale ranging from excellent to poor. This is followed by questions about health as limiting the performance of specific activities, about emotional problems as interfering with daily activities, and about mood and energy level.
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From page 262... ...
She argues that three rather separate lines of research and theory have been concerned with definitions of well-being: theories of human development; of clinical psychology; and of mental health, especially positive mental health. From these sources, she proposes six defining components of well-being: selfacceptance, purpose in life, environmental mastery, autonomy, personal growth, and positive relationships with others.
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From page 263... ...
The latter variations and the accompanying differences among individuals in their magnitude and duration imply the need for an additional criterion of well-being. This criterion might be termed resilience, and would measure the ability of an individual to deal effectively with stressful life events.
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From page 264... ...
Work and Well-Being To understand the meaning of a person's overall satisfaction with life requires breaking down the broad concept of life satisfaction and looking separately at the major life sectors marriage, family, work, income, housing, neighborhood, community, and others. Of these, work has a special significance.
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From page 265... ...
Emotional States Some recent innovative but controversial work on well-being explores a set of concepts involving emotional states both persistent moods and immediate pleasures and pains. Research on emotional states as immediate pleasures and pains is the focus of a substantial effort undertaken recently by psychologists (Kahneman et al., 1999; Seligman and Czikszentmihaly, 2000~.
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From page 266... ...
Thus the utility from the activity of cleaning house is derived in part from the instantaneous pleasures/pains associated with that activity, but may also encompass the future utility obtained when the clean house is used for social entertainment. In economic terminology, one might think of cleaning the house as an investment in a future benefit derived from using a clean and orderly house for social entertainment.
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From page 267... ...
Interestingly enough, questions about the satisfaction derived from specific activities produce results that are apparently inconsistent with conventional economic views of utility maximization. Economists tend to think of work as an activity producing a major extrinsic reward (income)
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From page 268... ...
Activities typically generate both intrinsic and extrinsic satisfaction or dissatisfaction. For example, cleaning the house can be thought of as yielding the extrinsic rewards associated with a clean and orderly house, which enhance the satisfaction associated with living in the house, plus any intrinsic satisfaction (or minus any intrinsic dissatisfaction)
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From page 269... ...
Yet the immediate satisfaction associated with activities has also been measured, although less often, by eliciting subjective judgments from respondents about the level of enjoyment derived from a specific list of activities or the instantaneous pleasure/pain associated with the activities. Data on satisfaction with activities tend to be used in analyses of time use or time allocation, in which the objective is to understand the choice of activities in terms of both satisfaction with the activities themselves (the flows)
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From page 270... ...
and Swedish time-use data provide measures of the satisfaction associated with different activities. The data on satisfaction with specific activities called process benefits turn out to be quite illuminating about the sources of life satisfaction and associated measures of well-being.
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From page 271... ...
developed a broad inventory of such negative events in a questionnaire form that has been widely used. Cross-sectional comparisons of people reporting different levels of stressful life events do not always show consistent
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From page 272... ...
, with comparable questions for major life domains. Cross-national comparisons should also include the experience of major life events, especially the stressful events that are increasingly likely in old age, such as illness, bereavement, retirement (complete or partial)
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From page 273... ...
Such retrospective efforts, however carefully undertaken, are vulnerable to the biases and limitations of individual memory. Much of this vulnerability can be avoided if people are asked to rate the pleasure or pain and/or satisfaction or dissatisfaction associated with specific activities at the time those activities are being performed.
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From page 274... ...
Klevmarken, N.A. 1999 Measuring investment in young children with time diaries.
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From page 275... ...
Riley 1994 Generational relations: A future perspective. In Aging and Generational Relations over the Life Course: A Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspective, T.K.
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