Group items tagged

In measuring overall human well-being then, subjective well-being should be placedalongside measures of non-subjective outcomes, such as income, health, knowledge andskills, safety, environmental quality and social connections

Inparticular, a distinction is commonly made between life evaluations, which involve acognitive evaluation of the respondent’s life as a whole (or aspects of it), and measures ofaffect, which capture the feelings experienced by the respondent at a particular point in time(Diener, 1984; Kahneman et al., 1999

eudaimonic aspect ofsubjective well-being, reflecting people’s sense of purpose and engagement

The framework used here covers all three concepts of well-being:●Life evaluation.●Affect.●Eudaimonia (psychological “flourishing”)

the result of a judgement by the individual rather than thedescription of an emotional state.

Elements of subjective well-beingLife evaluation

making an evaluation of this sort as involving the individual constructing a “standard” thatthey perceive as appropriate for themselves, and then comparing the circumstances oftheir life to that standard

Life evaluations are based on how people remember their experiences (Kahneman et al.,1999) and can differ significantly from how they actually experienced things at the time

It is for this reason that life evaluations are sometimes characterised as measures of“decision utility” in contrast to “experienced utility”

One of the mostwell documented measures of life evaluation – thePersonal Wellbeing Index– consists of eightquestions, covering satisfactions with eight different aspects of life, which are summedusing equal weights to calculate an overall index (International Wellbeing Group, 2006)

(job satisfaction, financial satisfaction, house satisfaction, healthsatisfaction, leisure satisfaction and environmental satisfaction),

AffectAffect is the term psychologists use to describe a person’s feelings. Measures of affectcan be thought of as measures of particular feelings or emotional states, and they aretypically measured with reference to a particular point in time.

Such measures capturehow people experience life rather than how they remember it (Kahneman and Krueger,2006

While an overall evaluation of life can be captured in a single measure, affect has atleast two distinct hedonic dimensions: positive affect and negative affect (Kahneman et al.,1999; Diener et al., 1999

positive affect is thought to be largely uni-dimensional

negative affect may be more multi-dimensional.