5 research outputs found
Response to Guttman & Levy's article âon the definition and varieties of attitude and wellbeingâ
Guttman and Levy have prepared an extravagant critique focused mainly on the 1980 Andrews-McKennell article in this journal. The clearly stated purpose of that article was to report a âseries of explorations into the affective and cognitive components of some of the more widely used measures of perceived well-beingâ. Guttman and Levy ignore this. They proceed on the mistaken impression that we were (or perhaps should have been) embarking upon a definitional exercise to relate the concepts of attitude and wellbeing. Yet the reason we did not cite their article on that topic was precisely because it did not address in a direct or focused way the topic that concerned us. Their critique consists of an entirely irrelevant reanalysis of some attitudinal data by Ostrom, together with a tissue of recondite definitional and methodological issues of little consequence either for the objectives or the conclusions of our research. Their dismissal of our work as âscientific retrogressionâ rests on an a priori definition of science that fits their own methodological style but excludes that of many other prominent researchers. Their comments reflect an attempt at methodological imperialism. We defend our independence â and that of other investigators â to use promising new methodologies other than the particular approach advocated by Guttman and Levy. (Their denunciation of the new methods of structural equation modeling is not shared even by the authoritative reviewer they themselves quote.) In addition to Guttman and Levy's specific criticisms, our Response addresses general methodological issues such as the status of structural modeling and the testing of structural models. In a concluding section we identify areas that merit further research.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43680/1/11205_2004_Article_BF00302509.pd
Models of cognition and affect in perceptions of well-being
How do people arrive at assessments of their own life quality? A series of models was developed to provide an interpretation of the way the factors of cognition and affect operate along with evaluations of specific life concerns (domains) in the perception of well-being. Following previous research, cognition was defined operationally as a factor which accounts for the covariance among a set of assessments of life-as-a-whole after affect, as measured by Bradburn's scales, is partialled out and after allowance is made for the presence of correlated measurement errors. It was found that loadings on the cognitive factor, and hence the interpretation of this factor, changed little despite quite large changes in the models. Moreover, in all major comparisons, models that contained the cognitive factor fitted the data better than models that did not. Models that included affect as the only variable intervening between the domains and the life-as-a-whole factor led to results that were intuitively difficult to accept. In the preferred model both affect and cognition were positioned as intervening variables. In this model it was found that the domain evaluations had no direct impact on life-as-a-whole assessments â the contribution of the domains was indirect by way of their association with cognition and affect. It was hypothesised that associated with each domain was a domain-specific element of affect and a domain-specific element of cognition. The linear additive relation found by previous researchers between domain evaluations and life-as-a-whole assessments would then be explainable as a statistical result arising from the summing of the domain-specific elements of affect and cognition.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43703/1/11205_2004_Article_BF00292640.pd
Measures of self-reported well-being: their affective, cognitive, and other components
This investigation begins from the hypothesis that social indicators of perceived well-being â e.g., people's assessment of their own life quality â will, like other attudes, reflect two basic types of influences: affect and cognition. In addition, the indicators were expected to include two other components: unique variance (mainly random measurement error) and correlated measurement error. These ideas are investigated using a structural modeling approach applied to 23 assessments of life-as-a-whole from a national survey of Americans ( N=1072 ) and/or a survey of urban residents in England ( N=932 ). In both sets of data, models that included affective and cognitive factors fit significantly better than more restricted models. Furthermore, as expected, measures of (a) âhappinessâ, âfunâ, and âenjoymentâ tended to be relatively more loaded with affect than were measures of (b) âsatisfactionâ, âsuccessâ, and âmeeting needsâ; and (c) measures designed to tap both affect and cognition tended to fall between the first two groups. In addition, the results suggest that measures employing relatively many scale points and direct assessments yield more valid indicators of people's evaluations of life-as-a-whole than do measures based on three-point scales or on explicit comparisons with other times or groups. These results contribute to basic knowledge about the nature of life quality assessments, help to explain some previously puzzling relationships with demographic factors such as age and education, and may be useful to designers of future studies of perceived well-being.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43702/1/11205_2004_Article_BF00286474.pd