Metrics of Subjective Well-Being: Limits and Improvements.

Abstract

Happiness is defined as the subjective enjoyment of one’s life as a whole, also called ‘life-satisfaction.’ Two components of happiness are distinguished; an affective component (how well one feels most of the time) and a cognitive component (the degree to which one perceived to get what one wants from life). In this chapter, I present an overview of valid measures of these concepts, drawing on the ‘Collection of Happiness Measures’ of the ‘World Database of Happiness’. To date (2016), this collection includes more than two- thousand measures of happiness, mostly single direct questions. Links in this text lead to detail about these measures and the studies in this chapter, I describe the differences and discuss their strengths and weaknesses