The Reliability of Subjective Well-Being Measures

TLDR: Reliability figures for subjective well-being measures are lower than those typically found for education, income and many other microeconomic variables, but they are probably sufficiently high to support much of the research that is currently being undertaken on subjectiveWell-being, particularly in studies where group means are compared.

About: This article is published in Journal of Public Economics.The article was published on 2008-08-01 and is currently open access. It has received 524 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Life satisfaction & Subjective well-being.

Figures

Table 6. Net Affect by Activity or Social Context

Table 3. Are Trait-like Feelings More Reliable?

Table 5. Examples of Correction ρ̂xy rxx ryy

Figure 2. Mean Net Affect for Activities by Session

Table 1. Estimates of Reliability for Well-Being Measures

Table 2. Correlations Between Selected Measures at Period 1 and Period 2

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

This paper studies the test-retest reliability of a standard self-reported life satisfaction measure and of affect measures collected from a diary method. Here the authors analyze the test-retest reliability of two measures of subjective well-being: a standard life satisfaction question and affective experience measures derived from the Day Reconstruction Method ( DRM ). The life satisfaction question that the authors examine is virtually identical to that used in the World Values Survey, and similar to that used in many other surveys. Consequently, the authors use the Day Reconstruction Method ( DRM ), in which participants are required to think about the preceding day, break it up into episodes, and describe each episode by selecting from several menus ( Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004 ). A critical advantage of the DRM is that it provides data on time-use – a valuable source of information in its own right, which has rarely been combined with the study of subjective well-being. In this paper the authors examine reliability measures for a sample of 229 women who each filled out a DRM questionnaire for two Wednesdays, two weeks apart in 2005. The authors also use these reliability estimates to correct observed relationships between reported well-being and other variables ( e. g., income ) for attenuation. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of measurement error for DRM studies and for well-being research more generally. Although economists have longstanding reservations about the feasibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility that the authors can only partially address here, another question concerns the reliability of such measurements for the same set of individuals over time. The authors can write where yi is the observed value for individual i, is the “ correct ” value, and ei is the error term. 

Q2. What is the key reason that SWLS has proven more reliable than single item questions?

A key reason that SWLS has proven more reliable than single item questions (see Table 1), is that since it is the sum of multiple items, it benefits from error reduction through aggregation. 

Q3. How many items of the SWLS were reliabilities when asked within the same day?

Kammann and Flett (1983) found that single-item well-being questions under the instructions to consider “the past few weeks” or “these days” had reliabilities of .50 to .55 when asked within the same day. 

Q4. How much was the total amount of money paid upon completing the first questionnaire?

Respondents were paid $50 upon completing the first questionnaire and an additional $100 upon completing the second one for a total of $150. 

Q5. What are the two recent proposed measures of affective experience?

Difmax and the U-index are recently proposed summary measures of affective experience (Kahneman & Krueger, 2006; Kahneman, Schkade, Krueger, Fischler & Krilla, 2006). 

Q6. How many women did they fill out the questionnaire?

In this paper the authors examine reliability measures for a sample of 229 women who each filledout a DRM questionnaire for two Wednesdays, two weeks apart in 2005. 

Q7. What is the way to measure subjective well-being?

Here the authors analyze the test-retest reliability of two measures of subjective well-being: a standard life satisfaction question and affective experience measures derived from the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM).