A major impulse for the study of subjective well-being has been the question how policy affects the distribution of subjective well-being within a country. A natural approach to learning about policy effects is to compare policies across countries and relate these to observed differences in well-being. Most of the work on international comparisons of well-being has been based on global satisfaction measures, like single questions inviting respondents to rate their happiness on a numerical or verbal scale. This work has produced widely conflicting findings. More recently, experienced well-being has been proposed as an alternative measure. Both approaches to the measurement of well-being are in principle vulnerable to Differential Item Functioning, particularly when used to compare different countries. We propose a thorough analysis of the properties of the different well-being measures and in particular how anchoring vignettes can be used to improve the comparability of well-being measures across population groups and across countries. To that end we will conduct several experiments in two population representative Internet panels: the American Life Panel (ALP) in the U.S. and the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social sciences (LISS) panel in The Netherlands.

Public Health Relevance

There is ample evidence that well-being is related to health outcomes, while subjective well-being is also an important outcome in its own right. A better understanding of how to measure subjective well-being and how alternative measures may lead to different conclusions will aid policy decision making.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Aging (NIA)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01AG040716-02
Application #
8337385
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZAG1-ZIJ-1 (M1))
Program Officer
Nielsen, Lisbeth
Project Start
2011-09-30
Project End
2013-02-17
Budget Start
2012-09-01
Budget End
2013-02-17
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
2012
Total Cost
$115,257
Indirect Cost
$49,934
Name
Rand Corporation
Department
Type
DUNS #
006914071
City
Santa Monica
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
90401
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