Quantification of Happiness Inequality

Happiness is considered to be an important aspect of human life and this is reflected in a growing interest of social sciences during the past decennia. Happiness research is only possible if happiness can be measured and quantified. The measurement of happiness, more specifically the way observation results are further processed, is discussed in this dissertation, which is intended to be a methodological contribution to happiness research. Happiness in this context is defined as “the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his/her life-as-a-whole favorably”. Traditionally, this happiness is measured by simply asking the person to rate it. A frequently used method is to ask a closed question, e.g. “Taking all together, how happy would you say you are ?” and to offer a limited number (3 – 7) of response categories, one of which has to be ticked, e.g. “pretty happy”. In particular such happiness questions with textual response categories, shortly referred to as “verbal scales”, form the object of the investigation presented here. Investigators of happiness are not just interested in individual happiness scores, they are also interested in happines

Index of Inequality-Adjusted Happiness (IAH) Improved: A Research Note

__Abstract__ Eight years ago we proposed a new measure of happiness in nations, called Inequality-Adjusted Happiness (IAH). This measure indicates how successful nations are in combining a high level of happiness and a low degree of inequality in happiness among citizens. The index gives equal weight to the level of happiness measured using the mean and inequality of happiness measured using the standard deviation. Scores on this index are now available for 139 nations. In this paper we present a technical improvement for the method to calculate IAH

Pooling Time Series Based on Slightly Different Questions About the Same Topic Forty Years of Survey Research on Happiness and Life Satisfaction in The Netherlands

Survey research on subjective wellbeing in The Netherlands started in the early 1970s. The time series happiness and life satisfaction that have emerged since then are unfortunately based on slightly different survey items of which one part uses verbal response scales and another part uses numerical response scales. The diversity of the survey items and a number of other measurement issues, such as the effects of changes in survey mode, hamper comparison over time and make it difficult to establish whether life became any better over the last forty years. These problems can be tackled using the recently developed Reference Distribution Method with which responses to equivalent but not identical survey questions can be pooled to obtain long, consistent time series. We applied the Reference Distribution method to pool time series of happiness and life satisfaction. We conclude that in the past 40 years the Dutch have become slightly happier and satisfied with their lives

'Very happy' is not always equally happy

Survey research is based on questioning and respondents typically answer to questions by picking one of several response options. These response options are labelled verbally with terms such as ‘very happy’ or ‘fairl

Stability of boundaries between response options of response scales: Does 'very happy' remain equally happy over the years?

__Abstract__ The differences between response scales in number and wording of response options make it hard to compare data from survey research and to perform research syntheses. A recent method that we have developed to tackle this problem is rooted in the idea that the transition points on a bounded continuum, on which verbal response options from a primary scale transit from one point to another, for instance from ‘happy’ to ‘very happy’, remain unchanged over time. The idea behind this is that although people may change their perception of, for example, their own happiness intensity over time, they are assumed not to change the degree of appreciation they attribute to the terms used to label response options. This is an important assumption for research syntheses that requires that everything remains unchanged, except for the change of interest. It means that if our method is applied to measurements at distinct points in time, differences in estimates of the mean and standard deviation can be attributed solely to changes in the frequency distributions on the primary scale. In this paper we apply the method to happiness and show that it is reasonable to assume that the transition points between the response options are stable over time

Conversion of Verbal Response Scales: Robustness Across Demographic Categories

Happiness and life satisfaction have traditionally been measured using verbal response scales, however, these verbal scales have not kept up with the present trend to use numerical response scales. A switch from a verbal scale to a numerical scale, however, causes a severe problem for trend analyses, due to the incomparability of the old and new measurements. The Reference Distribution Method is a method that has been developed recently to deal with this comparison problem. In this method use is made of a reference distribution based on responses to a numerical scale which is used to decide at which point verbally labelled response options transit from one state to another, for example from ‘happy’ to ‘very happy’. Next, for each wave of the time series in which the verbal scale is used, a population mean is estimated for the beta distribution that fits best to these transition points and the responses in this wave. These estimates are on a level that is comparable to that of the mean of the reference distribution and are appropriate for use in an extended time series based on the responses measured using a verbal and a numerical scale. In this paper we address the question of whether the transition points derived for the general population can be used for demographic categories to produce reliable, extended time series to monitor differences in trends among these categories. We conclude that this is possible and that it is not necessary to derive transition points for each demographic category separately

Inequality-Adjusted Happiness in Nations Egalitarianism and Utilitarianism Married in a New Index of Societal Performance

social inequality, happiness, utilitarianism, egalitarianism, Inequality-Adjusted Happiness,