Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being.pdf - 0 views
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such as interest,engagement and meaning,
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subjective well-being is taken to be:2Good mental states, including all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that peoplemake of their lives, and the affective reactions of people to their experiences
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“subjective well-being is an umbrella term for the different valuationspeople make regarding their lives, the events happening to them, their bodies and minds,and the circumstances in which they live”.
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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
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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
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The framework used here covers all three concepts of well-being:●Life evaluation.●Affect.●Eudaimonia (psychological “flourishing”)
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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
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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
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It is for this reason that life evaluations are sometimes characterised as measures of“decision utility” in contrast to “experienced utility”
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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)
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(job satisfaction, financial satisfaction, house satisfaction, healthsatisfaction, leisure satisfaction and environmental satisfaction),
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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.
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Such measures capturehow people experience life rather than how they remember it (Kahneman and Krueger,2006
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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