Book review: measuring happiness: the economics of wellbeing

This book examines the evolution of happiness research, considering the famous “Easterlin Paradox,” which found that people’s average life satisfaction didn’t seem to depend on their income. But they question whether happiness research can measure what needs to be measured. Laura Kudrna argues this book is well worth a read for its excellent coverage of much of the happiness literature from large surveys, as well as the interesting arguments put forth about how we should interpret this evidence

More years, less yawns: fresh evidence on tiredness by age and other factors

Objectives. It is commonplace for people to complain about being tired. There have been actually few studies of tiredness in large general population samples, and where studies do exist, the measures often rely on external assessments. We use a diary-based method to overcome these limitations in a representative sample of U.S. residents. Methods. Data come from the 2010 American Time Use Survey. Around 13,000 respondents provided a diary about the prior day and rated how tired they felt during selected activities. Regression analysis is used to explain variance in tiredness by age. Results. Regression analysis reveals that tiredness decreases with age. This relationship exists when we control for hours of sleep, gender, self-rated health, ethnic group, number of children, marital status, employment status, level of education, and the amount of time participants spent doing tiring activities. Discussion. Contrary to much previous research, tiredness decreases with age. People who are more than 65 years of age are almost one point on a 0–6 scale less tired than people aged between 15 and 24. Clinical implications and methodological limitations are discussed

Speaking to hearts before minds? public health messages aligned with people’s political intuitions may not increase vaccination uptake

What influences people’s attitudes towards vaccination? Laura Kudrna and Kelly Ann Schmidtke report on an experiment seeking to determine whether messages aligned with people’s politics influenced their intentions to take up the influenza vaccine. They find that the messages had no substantial effect

Changing the message to change the response: psychological framing effects during Covid-19

Laura Kudrna and Kelly Ann Schmidtke discuss new research on the effects of message framing in the context of COVID-19. Specifically, they ask whether campaign messages framed as being about ‘saving lives’ yield different responses to those framed as ‘preventing death’

It's Not Me It's You

This research looks at the relationships of money, education and work with happiness. It focusses upon how these relationships differ according to how happiness is measured and the 'reference group' considered - that is, the people to whom we compare or have knowledge of in some form. Acknowledgements: This research was funded by the Nuffield Foundation

Please award this degree, even though it is likely to make others miserable – and me too: an investigation of the relationships of absolute and relative socio-economic status with subjective wellbeing in the United States and England

This thesis argues that we can better understand the relationship between socio-economic status and subjective wellbeing (SWB) by considering more carefully to whom and how people make comparisons and what is meant by SWB. It questions existing knowledge with new empirical evidence and frameworks for both ‘reference groups’ – the people to whom we (may) make comparisons – and SWB. These contributions are situated within existing social comparison, norm and identity theories from economics and psychology. Using two large datasets from the United States and England, over 300 reference group measures are created. Nearly 4K models are analysed, adjusting for multiple comparisons. Although the results should be interpreted cautiously due to issues of endogeneity, they suggest that upward comparisons to others’ socio-economic attainment do matter for SWB and are almost always negative after accounting for individual attainment and multicollinearity. Comparisons to others of a similar age and to perceptions of those in ‘society’ matter most consistently. Socio-economic attainment in and of itself, however, is not sufficient to improve how people feel even if it improves their thoughts about how well their lives are going, and it is difficult to escape the negative effects of relative socio-economic status. Negative effects are evident across the distributions of SWB and absolute socio-economic status, for both women and men, and across age groups. It is not possible to dismiss the idea that comparisons to others’ socio-economic attainment do not matter – and yet, achieving socio-economically in absolute terms does not guarantee a life free of misery and full of happy and meaningful moments, either, even if this should be the ultimate aim of people and social policies. These results can inform normative debates about optimal resource distributions in societies and underscore the importance of considering how well people are doing socio-economically in relative and not only absolute terms

The measure matters: an investigation of evaluative and experience-based measures of wellbeing in time use data

Measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) are used to understand how people think and feel about their lives and experiences. But the measure used matters to conclusions about how well people’s lives are going. This research compares life evaluations and experienced SWB using nationally representative time use diaries, advancing previous research because diaries are less subject to recall biases than other, more popular methods. Analyses of over 20,000 US residents in 2012–2013 show life evaluations are more closely associated with positive and negative affect than experienced meaningfulness. Women have higher SWB than men except for negative affect, older age groups have higher SWB than middle age groups except for experienced meaningfulness, and younger age groups report the lowest experienced meaning. The unemployed have low life evaluations but experiences of SWB are similar across employment groups. A complete picture of SWB requires a complete set of measures