Subjective well-being refers to how people experience and evaluate their lives and specific domains and activities in their lives. This information has already proven valuable to researchers, who have produced insights about the emotional states and experiences of people belonging to different groups, engaged in different activities, at different points in the life course, and involved in different family and community structures. Research has also revealed relationships between people's self-reported, subjectively assessed states and their behavior and decisions. Research on subjective well-being has been ongoing for decades, providing new information about the human condition. During the past decade, interest in the topic among policy makers, national statistical offices, academic researchers, the media, and the public has increased markedly because of its potential for shedding light on the economic, social, and health conditions of populations and for informing policy decisions across these domains.
Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience explores the use of this measure in population surveys. This report reviews the current state of research and evaluates methods for the measurement. In this report, a range of potential experienced well-being data applications are cited, from cost-benefit studies of health care delivery to commuting and transportation planning, environmental valuation, and outdoor recreation resource monitoring, and even to assessment of end-of-life treatment options.
Subjective Well-Being finds that, whether used to assess the consequence of people's situations and policies that might affect them or to explore determinants of outcomes, contextual and covariate data are needed alongside the subjective well-being measures. This report offers guidance about adopting subjective well-being measures in official government surveys to inform social and economic policies and considers whether research has advanced to a point which warrants the federal government collecting data that allow aspects of the population's subjective well-being to be tracked and associated with changing conditions.
Table of Contents |
skim chapter | |
---|---|---|
Front Matter | i-xiv | |
Summary | 1-14 | |
1 Introduction | 15-28 | |
2 Conceptualizing Experienced (or Hedonic) Well-Being | 29-48 | |
3 Measuring Experienced Well-Being | 49-68 | |
4 Additional Conceptual and Measurement Issues | 69-86 | |
5 Subjective Well-Being and Policy | 87-102 | |
6 Data Collection Strategies | 103-124 | |
References | 125-136 | |
Appendix A: Experienced Well-Being Questions and Modules from Existing Surveys | 137-152 | |
Appendix B: The Subjective Well-Being Moduleof the American Time Use Survey:Assessment for Its Continuation | 153-182 | |
Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members | 183-188 | |
Committee on National Statistics | 189-190 |
The National Academies Press and the Transportation Research Board have partnered with Copyright Clearance Center to offer a variety of options for reusing our content. You may request permission to:
For most Academic and Educational uses no royalties will be charged although you are required to obtain a license and comply with the license terms and conditions.
For information on how to request permission to translate our work and for any other rights related query please click here.
For questions about using the Copyright.com service, please contact:
Copyright Clearance Center
22 Rosewood Drive
Danvers, MA 01923
Tel (toll free): 855/239-3415 (select option 1)
E-mail: info@copyright.com
Web: https://www.copyright.com
Loading stats for Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience...