2. WHAT IS SUBJECTIVE WELL BEING?
Subjective Well- Being (SWB) refers to how
people experiences their quality of their lives
and includes both emotional reactions and
cognitive judgments.
Psychologists defined happiness as
combination of life satisfaction and relative
frequency of positive and negative effects
3. Relate
subjective
well being
and
technology
• This study measures the welfare effects of
technological goods
• We find that fixed and mobile phones,
music players and personal computers,
Internet connection, are associated with
significantly higher levels of well-being
measured by individual self-reported life
satisfaction.
• we provide evidence suggesting that the
latter matters for life satisfaction, especially
for the users who already possess the
relevant devices.
• Keeping life satisfaction constant, we
subsequently derive substantial GDP per
capita estimates equivalent to a 10
percentage point increase in broadband and
mobile phone penetration.
4. Why does
subjective
well-being
matter?
In general, people’s own views about their lives, and the
quality of their day-to-day experiences, can play an important
part in building up a picture of the well-being of the
population. several reasons to use subjective well-being as a
complement to other more objective measures of life
circumstances:
• First, people’s feelings about life, and their emotional
states, can be seen as intrinsically important for their
quality of life. Someone who is deeply unsatisfied with their
life, who feels life has no meaning or purpose and
experiences extreme depression and sadness is unlikely to be
viewed as having a good quality of life. While it is clear that
people are sometimes willing to trade short-term feelings of
happiness for other outcomes of value, and regard
subjective well-being as an important outcome in its own
right.
5. • Second, subjective well-being measures seem to be able capture aspects of
life that other more conventional economic indicators can fail to highlight.
Eg.the importance of mental health, the quality of a person’s relationships,
and feelings of freedom, autonomy and trust.
• Rising economic prosperity is a very important mechanism for improving
people’s well-being, but rising GDP alone does not always guarantee political
stability, social harmony, or increasing happiness.
• Life satisfaction has also been shown to help to explain the choices people
make about moving between countries, over and above the economic factors
that drive migration, such as GDP per capita .
• Thirdly, there is evidence to suggest that low subjective well-being can be a
precursor to other issues and problems in people’s lives, while high levels of
subjective well-being associated with a range of positive life outcomes.
6. • Subjective well-being linked to objective well-being outcomes in
fields such as health, experiences of work, and aspects of social
connections .
• Measures of subjective well-being have a wide variety of potential
uses and audiences. These can include:
• Complementing other outcome measures (such as economic,
social and environmental measures) to help understand whether
people’s lives are improving.
• Helping to better understand the drivers of subjective well-being –
which can provide useful insights for policy-makers, charities,
institutions and employers, as well as individuals who might seek to
improve their own or other people’s quality of life.
Support policy evaluation and cost-benefit analysis,
particularly where non-market outcomes are involved.
7. Methods for measuring
subjective well-being.
• Subjective well-being is reported by the individual concerned, and
measured through survey questions
1. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), developed by Kahnemann,
Krueger, Schkade and Schwarz in 2004 , requires participants to think
about the preceding day, break it up into episodes, and describe each
episode in detail (such as the activities and emotions experienced during
episodes). The DRM involves memory, but is its designed to increase the
accuracy of emotional recall by inducing retrieval of the specifics of
successive episodes. The DRM also provides data on time-use, thus
enabling subjective well-being measures to be linked to different
activities, and also different interaction partners (colleagues, spouse,
etc.) [
8. The “gold standard” for measuring short-term affective experiences is
often considered to be Experience Sampling Method (ESM) or Ecological
Momentary Assessment (EMA), in which participants are prompted at
irregular intervals to record their current circumstances and feelings in real-
time.
• In this method, participants often carry a handheld computer that
prompts them several times during the course of the day (or days) to
answer a set of questions immediately. This method minimizes the role of
memory and therefore recall bias, but it can be expensive, intrusive, and
difficult to implement among large samples.
• That said, mobile technology and the development of smartphone
applications is rapidly reducing some of these traditional constraints.
Methods for measuring
subjective well-being.
2.
9. Use of subjective well-being
indicators
• Subjective indicators can give an overall picture of how a population
or a group within the population are faring, as for example in
relation to socioeconomic events (recession, …).
• Subjective indicators can be used to highlight groups and individuals
experiencing low well-being. This in turn, can inform decisions about
service delivery and priorities.
• Subjective indicators could be used to evaluate the impact of policy
or service-level decisions.
