Happiness, Positive Psychology and Measurement

Recently the OECD's Better Life Index has made some headlines, this example is from the Guardian and has the headline:

World's happiest OECD countries: in full

 A little reading around the headline quickly shows that this is not subjective happiness, it is based on eleven topics, Housing, Income, Jobs, Community, Education, Environment, Civic Engagement, Health, Life Satisfaction, Safety and Work-Life Balance.

 It does with the inclusion of Life Satisfaction include one subjective measure, which is assessed by survey. The ranking of the countries on this one measure can be seen here and a discussion on trying to measure subjective life satisfaction can be found here.

So this is about happiness as such, however having recently seen a talk on happiness by my friend and colleague Dave Webster I have been thinking about measuring happiness.

Measuring Happiness

Can happiness be measured?

Positive psychologists are investigating ways to measure happiness, they have one measure under construction (Authentic Happiness Inventory) and two other measures of happiness, the General Happiness Scale and the Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire. All of these are accessible via Dr. Martin Seligman's homepage, although you have to register to take the tests. In the interest of disclosure last time I took these tests my scores were, Authentic Happiness, 4.04 out of 5; General Happiness Scale, 7 out of 7; and 9 out of 10 on the Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire. All of these are quite high scores compared to most people that fill in the scales, I lost points on Authentic Happiness by scoring low on questions like question 4,

A. My life does not have any purpose or meaning.

B. I do not know the purpose or meaning of my life.

C. I have a hint about my purpose in life.

D. I have a pretty good idea about the purpose or meaning of my life.

E. I have a very clear idea about the purpose or meaning of my life.

and question 12,

A. In the grand scheme of things, my existence may hurt the world.

B. My existence neither helps nor hurts the world.

C. My existence has a small but positive effect on the world.

D. My existence makes the world a better place.

E. My existence has a lasting, large, and positive impact on the world.

I think that happiness can be measured at least as well (or as badly) as any other psychological object. As I detail in Chapter Nine of Tyson, Jones and Elcock there are problems with the whole psychometric enterprise, and measurements, be they attitudes, intelligence, personality, happiness or character strengths, are at best culturally and historically contingent and have meaning only in relation to the populations they have been developed within. For the happiness scale currently under development that population appears to be anglophone web users who are interested enough in the topic to use the website.

One of the dangers of all of these measuring tools is that they reify a particular working through of a concept, and that in turn may act as a political tool to promote one notion of what human beings are like.

All such measuring tools suffer from what Rom Harré called the 'meaning problem' which he applied more generally to the testing conditions in which psychology investigations take place. The problem is that people participating in a psychological experiment or survey may bring a variety of meanings to the situation, only some of which will match with what the investigator intends them to be. In effect these measuring scales may be measuring a varieties of happiness, not a single thing.

Multi-item scales tend to have better psychometric validity than single item scales, which leads to a second problem, people can respond to the individual items completely differently and yet be given the same overall score.

Finally there are a set of technical problems because the basis for these scales being equal interval scales is a, probably misapplied, principle of psychophysics, the just noticeable difference, which makes sense for an individual case, but may not when using aggregated data.

So can happiness be measured, a qualified yes. I prefer the types of metrics that the OECD use rather than the attempts to measure individual subjective happiness. If you believe personality tests measure personality, attitude scales measure attitudes or intelligence tests measure intelligence then happiness scales are just as good!