Subjective Well-Being Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience (2013) / Chapter Skim
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4 Additional Conceptual and Measurement Issues
4 Additional Conceptual and Measurement Issues
Pages 69-86
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From page 69... ...
The following issues are discussed here: • Whether respondents' answers to ExWB questions are subject to systematic biases and differences between groups -- defined by cul ture, age, or other traits -- that may invite misleading conclusions about respondents' actual hedonic experiences; • Susceptibility of ExWB measures to various biases induced by con text or by question ordering, and the importance of these effects; • Sensitivity of self-reported ExWB to changing situations and environments; • The role of adaptation and response shift in ExWB measurement; and • Scale and survey mode effects and the design of instruments. 4.1 Cultural Considerations The value that people place on various emotional states shapes their reports of subjective well-being (SWB)
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From page 70... ...
Anger and sadness appear to be more acceptable states among Germans than Americans, for example. Similarly, at older ages people report more mixed emotional experiences, even though they report higher overall levels of SWB than younger adults (Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2008)
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From page 71... ...
4.2 Aging and the Positivity Effect Because of its key research policy interest, attention to aging as it affects memory for emotional experience merits consideration in the mea surement of ExWB. The positivity effect refers to an age-related trend that favors positive over negative stimuli in cognitive processing.
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From page 72... ...
. Thus, although empirical examination is needed, the deliberative processing inherent in the DRM would likely reduce or eliminate age differences in that it involves reflection.
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From page 73... ...
about the high human costs of unemployment is based on life-evaluation measures, not measures of momentary emotional states. 4 Economists have generally relied on revealed preferences -- observations of people's actual decisions and choices -- as opposed to self-reports of intentions or inclinations.
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From page 74... ...
compared individuals' willingness to pay for goods and services related to urban regeneration using revealed preference and SWB methods. They found "that monetary estimates from SWB data are significantly higher than from revealed and stated preference data" and explain possible sources of these differences.
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From page 75... ...
People care about being happier for longer, but the SWB research field has not made much progress on methods for comparing "how much happier" with "how much longer." 4.4 Adaptation, response shift, and the validity of ExWB measures Hedonic adaptation is the psychological process whereby people adjust to and become accustomed to a positive or negative stimulus brought on by changed circumstances, a single event, or a recurring event. People's responses to questions about their well-being or quality of life have often reflected this, which potentially poses problems for using SWB measures, particularly for sorting out longitudinal effects when multiple determinants are at work.
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From page 76... ...
The reported scores of the case 1 person reflect a true change in ExWB that occurred as a result of hedonic adaptation or a change in values; case 2, in contrast, does not provide a valid assessment of the person's pain levels over time but is simply a recalibration of the reporting scale.5 For most purposes, researchers are interested in isolating the first category of phenomena, without the potential confounding of the second type of response shift. Another example of scale recalibration has to do with how questions are interpreted.
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From page 77... ...
Using data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia survey, a long-term longitudinal panel study, he found that disability cases showed approximately the same pattern of decrease in positive effect and increase in negative effect, with very little adaptation. For the loss of spouse or child, negative feelings increase sharply after the death but then fully return to baseline, while positive feelings rebound some, but do not return to previous levels (Clark et al., 2008)
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From page 78... ...
A welfare criterion based on experience utility would run the risk of failing to treat such outcomes as welfare-diminishing -- e.g., of treating an increase in cases of paraplegia as a welfare-neutral event. A broad implication of this line of thinking is that policy makers should be aware that people care about aspects of their life that cannot be captured by a single measure, whether it is willingness to pay, experienced utility, or something else.
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From page 79... ...
Typical examples include naturalistic context variables (e.g., the weather at the time of interview, sports news of the day) and research instrument variables (e.g., question order)
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From page 80... ...
The available data are compatible with these assumptions, but more systematic comparisons across measures, based on the same population and time frame, are needed. Considerations of context effects have played a strong role in the conceptualization and development of ExWB measures, and that work is continuing to explore the effects of context and determine ways to reduce unwanted effects.
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From page 81... ...
A split-sample randomized trial using experimental national data conducted by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported an effect of question order on multiple-item positive and negative emotion questions (Office for National Statistics, 2011)
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From page 82... ...
However, they also found that buffer questions that are related to the subsequent SWB questions could prime responses in a way that generates additional context effects. More work is needed to study the frequency with which context and question-order effects arise, their severity, the effectiveness of methods to reduce them, and how they may impact measures of evaluative well-being and ExWB differentially.
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From page 83... ...
have documented mood changes associated with the weather, question order, or minor events such as finding a dime before answering a question, which in turn influence reported life satisfaction; others have "used structural models to attempt to separate situational variability from random error and basic stability" (Krueger and Schkade, 2008)
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From page 84... ...
4.8 Survey-mode effects Survey mode refers to the vehicle used to ask respondents questions -- by personal interview, phone, Internet instrument, and so on. Preliminary results, discussed in this section, indicate that survey mode has a significant impact on responses and, perhaps more importantly, on who responds in the first place.
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From page 85... ...
, research on the magnitude of these effects and methods for mitigating them should be a priority for statistical agen cies during the process of experimentation and testing of new SWB modules.10 The OECD Guidelines presents a thorough review of the issues and the evidence in the literature, and it offers sensible guidance on next steps: Where mixed-mode surveys are unavoidable, it will be important for data comparability to select question and response formats that do not require extensive modifications for presentation in different modalities. Details of the survey mode should be recorded alongside responses, and mode effects across the data should be systematically tested and reported .
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From page 86... ...
86 SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING This section has touched on most, though not all, of the major measurement hurdles facing SWB measurement.11 Until the issues discussed here are more fully sorted out, using split trial and other experiments, it is hard to make the case for expanding SWB questions into the major U.S. federal surveys.
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