A recent paper by Gus O’Donnell and Andrew Oswald considers
the question of how to combine measures of different aspects of subjective
well-being into a single overall measure.
The authors focused specifically on the four aspects of
well-being measured in annual surveys by the UK Office of National Statistics.
These are:
- how satisfied you are with your life nowadays;
- to what extent you feel that the things you do in your life are worthwhile;
- how happy you felt yesterday; and
- how anxious you felt yesterday.
The approach taken by O’Donnell and Oswald in their
exploratory study implies that all aspects of happiness should be weighted
according to their “social importance” as determined by the average weight
given to them by citizens in opinion surveys. The specific method they employ
involves asking people to allocate 100 points across the four measures. For
example, if all four measures were considered to be equally important, 25%
would be allocated to each measure.
This method of developing weights seems to me to be much
better suited to combining well-being indicators such as those included in the
OECD’s Better Life index (e.g. income, education, health, environment) than to
combining survey data relating to different aspects of subjective well-being.
I feel uneasy about the method adopted because I don’t think
individual citizens are equipped to make judgments about the “social
importance” of the feelings of others. For example, the majority view about the
“social importance” of feelings of anxiety might understate the impact of
anxiety on the well-being of people who suffer from anxiety.
The authors have reported results from the use of their
method of obtaining weights from four different samples: economics students,
MBA students, professional economists, and a wider group of citizens chosen
using web-based methods. All groups gave anxiety the lowest average weight, but
apart from that there is not much common ground in the views of the different
groups. The wider group of citizens gave happiness the greatest weight, but the
other groups all gave life satisfaction the greatest weight. The economics and
MBA students gave “doing worthwhile things” a much higher weight than
happiness, but professional economists gave it about the same weight as
happiness.
It seems to me that a better way to proceed would be to
attempt to estimate the well-being of individuals by using weighting systems
that individuals consider to be relevant to their own lives. There are
potentially several ways to do that.
First, there is the approach adopted by Daniel Benjamin et
al in their paper, “Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction”, discussed on this blog, in which people were asked to choose between hypothetical situations using
different measures of happiness and a range of different ratings.
Another possible approach would to ask survey respondents
questions along the following lines: “If you were offered an opportunity that
would add a 1 point improvement in your feeling that the things you do in life
are worthwhile, how much life satisfaction would you be willing to forgo in
order to obtain that benefit?” When I ask myself that question the answer I
obtained seemed to make sense, but my mind went blank when I ask myself how
much life satisfaction I would be willing to forgo in order to obtain a 1 point
increase in happiness. The same happened when I asked myself how much happiness
I would be willing to forgo in order to obtain a 1 point increase in life
satisfaction. So I can hardly recommend that approach!
The third approach is to simply ask survey respondents to
allocate 100 points across the four measures according to the weight that they
consider should give to the different measures in assessing changes over time
in their own personal well-being. That approach has the virtue of being simple
and directly related to estimation of relevant weights.
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