Subjective Well-Being Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience (2013) / Chapter Skim
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3 Measuring Experienced Well-Being
3 Measuring Experienced Well-Being
Pages 49-68
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From page 49... ...
3.1 Ecological Momentary Assessment ESM is a research methodology that asks participants to stop at certain times and make notes of their experience in real time -- it measures immediate experience or feelings. EMA refers to a class of methods designed to track emotions associated with experiences as they occur, in everyday life; they thus avoid both reliance on memory and context effects caused by artificial environments (e.g., a laboratory)
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From page 50... ...
Response rates may be especially low among people who have the most difficulty using the devices (e.g., those with 1 For this report, the panel uses the term "EMA" to refer to the class of methods that in cludes both EMA and ESM. 2 In its original form, EMA uses randomly selected intervals to avoid bias that could be incurred by a fixed interval schedule.
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From page 51... ...
However, these methods have not typically been practical for general population surveys because they involve highly intensive methods, are difficult to scale up to the level of nationally representative surveys, and involve considerable respondent burden, which can lead to low response rates. For these reasons, while momentary assessment methods have proven important in research, they have not typically been in the purview of federal statistical agencies.
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From page 52... ...
The importance of this topic is that, if single-day ExWB measures are found to be credible for research, the case for including them in large-scale national surveys is strengthened. However, if single-day measures do not approximate ExWB as captured in the more intensive momentary approaches, then, depending on the survey objectives, the case for including them is undermined.
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From page 53... ...
One way to establish credibility for an overall day measure is to see how well it approximates an "integral" over 1 entire day of momentary assessments. This kind of credibility for single-day ExWB measures would seem to be a prerequisite for including them in large-scale national surveys.
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From page 54... ...
As noted above, momentary assessment data collection has typically not been feasible for nationally representative government surveys because it involves considerable respondent burden, which can lead to low response rates. Similarly, end-of-day instruments (usually defined as "before bed")
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From page 55... ...
(2012) used global-yesterday measures to extend knowledge about day-of-the-week associations with ExWB measures.
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From page 56... ...
One way to measure the level of daily variability is to compute the ratio of over-days variation (that is, with SDMs repeated daily for some respondents) to all variation (that is, the total variation due to daily variation, between-person variation, measurement error, and so on)
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From page 57... ...
(Appropriate data weighting methods may also be used to correct sampling bias.) The Gallup datasets -- along with others such as the International Social Survey Program, the World Values Survey, and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe -- have also afforded an opportunity to examine the statistical power (which is a function of daily variability)
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From page 58... ...
measure will have a lower standardized effect size. This distinction is important when comparing effect sizes from different measurement strategies, especially those that do not contain daily variation.
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From page 59... ...
And various survey issues need more attention; for example, "What biases are created because working people are easier to reach on the weekends? " Additionally, because small effect sizes due to daily variation are compounded when the data are studied at the individual level (and most large-scale surveys are reported at the aggregate level where item reliability and effect sizes will be more substantial)
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From page 60... ...
. The DRM was created to assess subjective experiences in a manner that specifically avoids problems of many recallbased measures while being more affordable and less burdensome than momentary methods.
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From page 61... ...
3.3.1 Comparing DRM with Momentary Approaches For ranking the relative merits of the competing ExWB measurement approaches, the panel took as its starting point the following statement, which is distilled from assessments of the reliability of SWB measures articulated by Krueger and Schkade (2008) and by Krueger et al.
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From page 62... ...
One version was implemented as the Princeton Affect and Time Survey; a variant is included in the ATUS SWB module, which assesses affect for three randomly selected episodes after respondents com plete a whole-day stylized diary with minimal reconstruction of the three selected nonconsecutive episodes. (Notably, though, the entire day is reconstructed in both methods; only the feelings information is limited to being recalled for the selected episodes.)
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From page 63... ...
The findings in Box 3-1 suggest that DRM measures of mood and physical symptoms closely approximate summary measures created from an EMA protocol. Where there were systematic differences, DRM estimates of negative mood and physical symptoms, such as pain and fatigue, tended to be lower than those collected by EMA.
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From page 64... ...
Thus, each participant has one EMA score for average happiness, one DRM score for average happiness, and of course the single summary score from the standard recall-based measure. Mean Levels of Mood and Symptoms by Method of Assessment EMA Estimate DRM Estimate Recall-Based Estimate Happy 2.8 2.7 3.0 Depressed 0.6 0.5 0.7 Pain 1.2 1.1 1.5 Fatigue 1.3 1.1 1.4 Activity level 1.8 1.6 2.7 Compared to the EMA estimates, standard recall-based survey measures of happiness, depression, pain, fatigue, and activity level all showed levels that were higher, and markedly so in the case of activity level (all comparisons significant at p < .05, with the exception of fatigue; Stone et al., 2012, p.
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From page 65... ...
This analysis is important, be cause it shows that DRM diurnal patterns resembled EMA patterns more closely than they resembled participants' beliefs about these patterns. Where the recall based measure diverged from the EMA averaged estimate, the DRM measures still tracked with the EMA measures.
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From page 66... ...
If activity and time allocation are not included in a survey design, data analyses are limited to considering the influence of sociodemographic characteristics, such as those that dominate the literature on evaluative well-being. CONCLUSION 3.6: Capturing the time-use and activity details of survey respondents enhances the policy relevance of ExWB measures by embedding information about relationships between emotional states and specific activities of daily life.
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From page 67... ...
Among additional research questions, one is how to weight events in a DRM approach, given that people experience different numbers of episodes of different durations and that affect has been shown to correlate with duration of episode. Another key research question is the reliability and usefulness of shorter, hybrid, DRM-like methods linking to activities.7 The overall goal of this research would be to produce something 7 Inresearch being funded by the National Institute on Aging, Jacqui Smith and colleagues are tackling this issue by comparing Health and Retirement Study findings with the DRM data collected in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the ATUS SWB module, and the American Life Panel's DRM measures.
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From page 68... ...
Although duration-weighted measures are usually used, other combinations of the data from time use and affective data are possible, such as the U-index. Chapter 6, on data collection strategies, returns to considerations about the next steps for the ATUS SWB module and other shortened variants of the DRM.
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