Measuring objective and subjective well-being: dimensions and data sources

Dimensions of Subjective Well-Being

We use two waves of a population based survey (the RAND American Life Panel) to investigate the relations between various evaluative and experienced well-being measures based on the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, the Gallup Wellbeing Index, and a 12-item hedonic well-being module of the Health and Retirement Study. In a randomized set-up we administered several versions of the survey with...

Personality Dimensions and Subjective Well-Being

Personality dimensions and subjective well-being.

This work examines the association between personality dimensions (extraversion and neuroticism) and subjective well-being. Subjective well-being is associated both with extraversion and neuroticism, and currently, neuroticism is generally considered the more important. A total of 368 students from the University of Rovira i Virgili completed the Extraversion and Neuroticism subscales of the re...

Viewpoint: Measuring and understanding subjective well-being

Increasing attention is being paid in academic, policy, and public arenas to subjective measures of well-being. This promising trend represents a shift towards measuring positive outcomes in psychology and greater realism in the study of economic behaviour. We describe the main measures of subjective well-being (SWB) and provide examples of policy-relevant research findings, including new accou...

Measuring global progress through subjective well-being

Progress could in principle be measured through the change over time of average scores of subjective well-being. However, the existing longitudinal data show little improvement. These survey results are intrinsically insensitive to developments over time, because SWB is typically evaluated relative to proximate, and therefore salient, reference points, such as peers or expectations based on rec...