Assessing Well-Being

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Assessing Well-Being"

Catherine Hood
5 years ago
Views:

2 Assessing Well-Being

3 Social Indicators Research Series Volume 39 General Editor: ALEX C. MICHALOS University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, Canada Editors: ED DIENER University of Illinois, Champaign, U.S.A. WOLFGANG GLATZER J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany TORBJORN MOUM University of Oslo, Norway MIRJAM A.G. SPRANGERS University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands JOACHIM VOGEL Central Bureau of Statistics, Stockholm, Sweden RUUT VEENHOVEN Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands This new series aims to provide a public forum for single treatises and collections of papers on social indicators research that are too long to be published in our journal Social Indicators Research. Like the journal, the book series deals with statistical assessments of the quality of life from a broad perspective. It welcomes the research on a wide variety of substantive areas, including health, crime, housing, education, family life, leisure activities, transportation, mobility, economics, work, religion and environmental issues. These areas of research will focus on the impact of key issues such as health on the overall quality of life and vice versa. An international review board, consisting of Ruut Veenhoven, Joachim Vogel, Ed Diener, Torbjorn Moum, Mirjam A.G. Sprangers and Wolfgang Glatzer, will ensure the high quality of the series as a whole. For futher volumes:

4 Ed Diener Editor Assessing Well-Being The Collected Works of Ed Diener 123

5 Editor Prof. Ed Diener University of Illinois Dept. Psychology 603 E. Daniel St. Champaign IL USA ISSN ISBN e-isbn DOI / Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: c Springer Science+Business Media B.V No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Cover design: Boekhorst Design BV Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (

6 Contents Introduction Measuring Well-Being: Collected Theory and Review Works 1 Ed Diener Temporal Stability and Cross-Situational Consistency of Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive Responses... 7 Ed Diener and Randy J. Larsen Assessing Subjective Well-Being: Progress and Opportunities Ed Diener The Evolving Concept of Subjective Well-Being: The Multifaceted Nature of Happiness Ed Diener, Christie Napa Scollon, and Richard E. Lucas Review of the Satisfaction With Life Scale William Pavot and Ed Diener Subjective Well-Being: The Convergence and Stability of Self-Report and Non-Self-Report Measures Ed Sandvik, Ed Diener, and Larry Seidlitz Measuring Positive Emotions Richard E. Lucas, Ed Diener, and Randy J. Larsen Experience Sampling: Promises and Pitfalls, Strengths and Weaknesses Christie Napa Scollon, Chu Kim-Prieto, and Ed Diener Life-Satisfaction Is a Momentary Judgment and a Stable Personality Characteristic: The Use of Chronically Accessible and Stable Sources Ulrich Schimmack, Ed Diener, and Shigehiro Oishi v

7 vi Contents Happiness is the Frequency, Not the Intensity, of Positive Versus Negative Affect Ed Diener, Ed Sandvik, and William Pavot Income s Differential Influence on Judgments of Life Versus Affective Well-Being Ed Diener, Daniel Kahneman, Raksha Arora, James Harter, and William Tov New Measures of Well-Being Ed Diener, Derrick Wirtz, Robert Biswas-Diener, William Tov, Chu Kim-Prieto, Dong-won Choi, and Shigehiro Oishi Conclusion: Future Directions in Measuring Well-Being Ed Diener

8 Contributors Raksha Arora The Gallup Organization, Washington, DC 20004, USA, Robert Biswas-Diener Center for Applied Positive Psychology, Dong-won Choi Department of Psychology, California State University, East Bay, Hayward, CA 94542, USA, Ed Diener Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA, James Harter The Gallup Organization, Washington, DC 20004, USA, Jim Daniel Kahneman Princeton University, Princeton, NJ , USA, Chu Kim-Prieto Department of Psychology, College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ 08628, USA, Randy J. Larsen Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, USA, Richard E. Lucas Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA, Shigehiro Oishi Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, William Pavot Department of Psychology, Southwest Minnesota State University, Marshall, NM 56258, USA, Ed Sandvik Ulrich Schimmack University of Toronto, Mississauga, Ontario, L5L 1C6, Canada, Christie Napa Scollon School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, Singapore , vii

9 viii Contributors Larry Seidlitz William Tov Singapore Management University, Singapore , Derrick Wirtz East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, USA,

10 Endorsements Over the past several decades Professor Diener has contributed more than any other psychologist to the rigorous research of subjective well-being. The collection of this work in this series is going to be of invaluable help to anyone interested in the study of happiness, life-satisfaction, and the emerging discipline of positive psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology and Management, Claremont Graduate University Ed Diener, the Jedi Master of the world s happiness researchers, has inspired and informed all of us who have studied and written about happiness. His life s work epitomizes a humanly significant psychological science. How wonderful to have his pioneering writings collected and preserved for future students of human wellbeing, and for practitioners and social policy makers who are working to promote human flourishing. David G. Myers, Hope College, and author, The Pursuit of Happiness Ed Diener s work on life satisfaction theory and research has been groundbreaking. Having his collected works available will be a great boon to psychologists and policy-makers alike. Christopher Peterson, Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan By looking at happiness and well-being in many different cultures and societies, from East to West, from New York City to Calcutta slums, and beyond, Ed Diener has forever transformed the field of culture in psychology. Filled with bold theoretical insights and rigorous and, yet, imaginative empirical studies, this volume ix

11 x Endorsements will be absolutely indispensable for all social and behavioral scientists interested in transformative power of culture on human psychology. Shinobu Kitayama, Professor and Director of the Culture and Cognition Program, University of Michigan Ed Diener is one of the most productive psychologists in the world working in the field of perceived quality of life or, as he prefers, subjective well-being. He has served the profession as a researcher, writer, teacher, officer in professional organizations, editor of leading journals, a member of the editorial board of still more journals as well as a member of the board of the Social Indicators Research Book Series. As an admirer of his work and a good friend, I have learned a lot from him, from his students, his relatives and collaborators. The idea of producing a collection of his works came to me as a result of spending a great deal of time trying to keep up with his work. What a wonderful public and professional service it would be, I thought, as well as a time-saver for me, if we could get a substantial number of his works assembled in one collection. In these three volumes we have not only a fine selection of past works but a good number of new ones as well. So, it is with considerable delight that I write these lines to thank Ed and to lend my support to this important publication. Alex C. Michalos, Ph.D., F.R.S.C., Chancellor, Director, Institute for Social Research and Evaluation; Professor Emeritus, Political Science, University of Northern British Columbia

12 Editor s note concerning source publications Diener & Larsen: Temporal Stability and Cross- Situational Consistency of affective, behavioral, and cognitive responses, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47/4 (1984), American Psychological Association Diener: Assessing Subjective Well-Being: Progress and Opportunities, Social Indicators Research, 31/2 (1994), Springer SBM Diener, Scollon, & Lucas: Evolving conceptions of subjective well-being: The multifaceted nature of happiness, (P. Costa, I.C. Siegler) Advances in Cell Aging and Gerontology: Recent Advances in Psychology and Aging, 15, 2004, Elsevier Pavot & Diener: Review of the Satisfaction With Life Scale, Psychological Assessment, 5/2 (1993), American Psychological Association Sandvik, Diener, & Seidlitz: Subjective well-being: the convergence and stability of self-report and non-self-report measures, Journal of Personality, 61/3 (1993), Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Lucas, Diener, & Larsen: Measuring Positive Emotions, (S.J. Lopez, C.R. Snyder) Positive Psychological Assessment: A Handbook of Models and Measures, 2003, American Psychological Association Scollon, Kim-Prieto, & Diener: Experience Sampling: Promises and Pitfalls, Strengths and Weaknesses, Journal of Happiness Studies, 4/1 (2003), Springer SBM Schimmack, Diener, & Oishi: Life-satisfaction is a momentary judgment and a stable personality characteristic: The use of chronically accessible and stable sources, Journal of Personality, 70/3 (2002), Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Diener, Sandvik, & Pavot: Happiness is the frequency, not intensity, of positive versus negative affect, (F. Strack, M. Argyle, N. Schwarz) Subjective Well-Being: An interdisciplinary perspective, 1991, Elsevier xi

13 Introduction Measuring Well-Being: Collected Theory and Review Works Ed Diener Progress on Assessing Well-Being Measurement is the most important activity in behavioral science, and perhaps the activity that is undervalued the most. It can be argued that scientific understanding and measurement go hand in hand. Indeed, this is the insight offered by Cronbach and Meehl (1955) when they argued that the development of a measure and the understanding of the underlying phenomena go hand-in-hand. Many people, even researchers themselves, think of measurement as a technical affair to be performed by the slower and less creative scientists, while the geniuses are busy formulating grand theories. In fact, Greenwald (2001, 2002) found that the majority of Nobel prizes in the sciences go to work on measurement rather than theory. And as argued above, theory and measurement usually advance together. To be able to measure something well means that we must have a good theory about that phenomenon. In addition, what sets science apart from other approaches to knowledge, such as philosophy or theology, is the heavy grounding it has in the empirical method. Thus, observing, recording, and measuring are core aspects of science, and their importance cannot be underestimated. Several core issues occur in the measurement of subjective well-being. One is the definition and inclusion of some phenomena and the exclusion of others. What is subjective well-being, and what are its components? When people respond to well-being self-report measures, what are the psychological processes involved? For example, how much do they call on memory versus their general self-concept? How do they weight various areas of their lives? How do various methods, such as self-report, experience sampling, and informant reports, converge with one another? Finally, how large is the problem of measurement artifacts? E. Diener (B) Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA; The Gallup Organization ediener@uiuc.edu E. Diener (ed.), Assessing Well-Being: The Collected Works of Ed Diener, Social Indicators Research Series 39, DOI / , C Springer Science+Business Media B.V

14 2 E. Diener Overview of this Volume The papers in this book begin to answer the questions above, and in some cases provide substantial answers. The chapters cover the validity and other psychometric properties of the existing scales, but they also delve deeper in order to analyze the psychological properties that influence the measures. Thus, the chapters offer initial analyses of the psychological processes that influence scores, for example processes that affect respondents answers to surveys. The Diener and Larsen (1984) paper established that studying people s long-term well-being is worthy of study because there is some consistency across situations and over time in people s feelings of well-being. Without such stability, it would be no use studying the well-being of persons because the major variability would be due to situational factors and error. We found that there is much stability in people s reports of life satisfaction, although some change as well, and a moderate amount of stability in people s moods and emotions. This means that the study of happy versus unhappy individuals will capture the meaningful variation in feelings of well-being, but not all of it, because some of the variation will be due to situations and the interaction of situations and persons. The Diener and Larsen paper establishes a bedrock of study in this area because it provides support for the notion that people do differ from one another in a somewhat consistent way in terms of feelings and judgments of well-being. The review of subjective well-being measurement that I wrote for Social Indicators Research in 1994 became a citation classic for that journal because it described the validity of the scales and what was known about the problems of measurement artifacts. In general, the news was encouraging because the validity evidence for the scales was generally positive and because the effects of artifacts, although present, were often relatively small. At the same time, the review pointed to areas where understanding was only beginning, such as in the influence of memory on the reporting of well-being, and where much more research was needed. I also described in this article a number of non-self-report measures of well-being. In the following chapter by Diener, Scollon, and Lucas (2004), we present an updated review of measures of well-being and our theoretical understanding of the measures. We outline what is known about the structure of well-being and its discriminant validity from other concepts. We also present a theoretical model of well-being measures in terms of a time-sequence of responses to life events, varying from immediate reactions to summary judgments of life. The Pavot and Diener (1993) article reviewed the Satisfaction with Life Scale that we created in the 1980s and the data on the scale at the time. The Diener, Emmons, Larsen, and Griffin (1985) paper in which the SWLS was first presented has become a citation classic within psychology, with over 1,600 citations, and the Pavot and Diener paper in this volume is the most comprehensive review of the scale. In 2008, Pavot and I published another review of the scale, which includes more material on the cognitive processes involved when people respond to the items, plus a review of more recent studies using the measure. However, the 1993 article is still the most thorough in terms of reviewing findings using this widely-used measure of life satisfaction.

15 Introduction 3 The Sandvik, Diener, and Seidlitz (1993) paper is another that has received widespread attention because it documented the fact that self-report well-being scales correlate with a number of other methods of measuring the same concepts, such as with reports by knowledgeable informants (family and friends), experience sampling measurement, and the memory for good versus bad life events. A single factor was found to underlie measures using different methods, and a number of different well-being self-report measures were found to correlate with the non-self-report measures. Thus, although the self-report measures of well-being are imperfect, and can be influenced by response artifacts, they have substantial validity as shown by their correlations with measurements based on alternative methods. Whereas the Pavot and Diener article reviewed the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Lucas, Diener, and Larsen (2003) paper reviews various approaches to assessing positive emotions. As we wrote in the chapter in this volume in which we present new measures, we do not consider any of the existing measures of positive affect to be entirely acceptable for measuring subjective well-being in the affect area, and that is why we have created and validated a new measure. A major method of measuring well-being besides the typical survey method is the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), also sometimes referred to as EMA (Ecological Momentary Assessment). In the Scollon et al. (2003) article, we review how this method is performed and the benefits and shortcomings of the approach. In this method, the participants are signaled through the day, usually at random moments, and asked to record what they are doing and feeling at the moment. In most modern studies a handheld computer is used to deliver the questions and record the responses. The approach is time-consuming for participants and researchers alike, but is likely to yield a more accurate assessment of people s emotional lives. Furthermore, the discrepancies between longer-term reports of emotions and those obtained from ESM can be revealing in terms of how people s memories differ from actual experience. There are alternative methods for recording naturally-occurring moods and emotions, for example the Daily Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone 2004). The next chapters in this volume are concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of the measures. For example, Schimmack et al. (2002) discuss the types of information that people use when they make life satisfaction judgments, and the fact that when this information changes in their lives, the judgments also move. People make life satisfaction judgments based on information that is salient and relevant to them. Because of this, certain passing influences can affect the judgments. However, certain types of information can be chronically salient, such as a person s marriage quality, and are therefore used whenever life satisfaction is computed by that individual. To the degree that these sources of information are stable for people, and they often are, life satisfaction judgments are also fairly stable. Furthermore, we found that the effects of personality on life satisfaction were mediated by the influence of personality on a person s moods and emotions. In the article by Diener, Sandvik, and Pavot (1991), we argue that overall wellbeing depends more on frequently feeling positive moods than on experiencing them intensely. This prediction derived from several ideas. First, we thought that frequency and duration of moods and emotions can be measured more accurately

The Science of Well-Being

The Science of Well-Being Social Indicators Research Series Volume 37 General Editor: ALEX C. MICHALOS University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, Canada Editors: ED DIENER University of Illinois,