Tools to measure well-being

This post is a reflection for a course I am taking at Renison University College at the University of Waterloo. The course is titled Positive Psychology and is taught by Professor Denise Marigold, currently the Chair of Social Development Studies.

The topic of the reflection is from the course, though the response is my own.

To prepare for the writing of this post, I took a number of online psychological assessments of my current well-being. These questionnaires can be found on the Authentic Happiness website from the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. To take the questionnaires yourself you just need to register for a free account on their site. Here are my results:

The Satisfaction with Life Scale is the inventory where I had the highest absolute and relative scale. My score was in the 90th percentile for both general responses and matched to my demographic. This five-question survey asked you to look back and consider whether your life has gone your way and if you think the conditions of your life were good. It is no surprise to me that my score is very high on this survey, as I am very grateful for all the privileges and opportunities I have had in my life and looking at my life objectively I have had a lot of things go well, so I am quite satisfied in that regard.

I think the retrospective nature of this measure would be good for the reliability over time, but it may not be a very valid measure of someone's general well-being. I know personally that the specific questions prompted me to actually change how I looked at things, which was nice but not necessarily good from a measurement standpoint.

The much longer Authentic Happiness Inventory was the one I scored the next highest on, similarly around the 90th percentile of respondents. It similarly mixes in questions which ask how successful you feel, and how engaged you are in life, and whether you generally get what you want. Using these kinds of metrics, I am again not surprise that I would score high, as I do think a lot of things have gone well for me.

Like the last one I am not sure that this measure would give a good look at well-being per sae. As the one of the longest inventories in the list, I liked that it asked you to rate things in a number of different ways. I think measure would probably be one of the best on the list for getting consistent results for people from different cultures, as it doesn't ask for a lot of specific quantifications that would be open to interpretation but rather produces a quantitative score based on a larger number of qualitative responses. That said I imagine it is quite likely that a lot of people would score very similarly on this measure, making it hard to get data on the extreme ends of the spectrum which might answer most questions at one extreme.

The Approaches to Happiness questionnaire gets into somewhat the different angles these measurements tools use. It is split into three separate measures. Unlike the previous two measures though that had a lot of questions related to how well you think your life has gone, and how satisfied you are with it, this questionnaire looks at how well you use your strengths (good life), how meaningful your life is, and how pleasant your life is. I scored in the 60th percentile for both good life and meaningful life, and in the 50th percentile for pleasant life. I would say the score for good life is lower than I would have expected, as I think I do a lot to use my strengths and to have a lot of flow in life. I would say that the meaningful life is actually higher than I expected, as I would say that is something I am currently working to improve, so I am surprised it is above average. On the pleasant life score I am not surprised it is around average, as I have my good and bad days from a pleasure standpoint.

I liked the way this measure tried to split up happiness up to look at it not just as a monolith but as a multidimensional measure of someone's well-being. I think approach may be useful in teasing out the differences between different groups. I don't quite understand their measure of "good life", but I liked the way they separated a pleasant life from a meaningful life.

The Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire is by far the simplest of the measurements here. It basically just straight up asks you how happy you are usually, and then directly asks you to estimate how much you feel happy, unhappy, and neutral. I scored below average on both of these, which is interesting to me because I thought I put pretty high numbers. Apparently, a lot of people who take these surveys consider themselves pretty happy and are that way most of the time.

I think this measure could be useful to look at an individual's changes over time, but I don't think it would be a good comparison across a population, or especially for people from different backgrounds. I think that there would likely be a large variation on the percentages or values people assign to their happiness, with some people always scoring at the extremes, or others scoring more towards the middle. I think I fell into the latter group which might have made my scores look lower than they might have otherwise been.

Finally, the General Happiness Scale was another short one with just four questions. It basically again directly asks you to assess your happiness both in absolute terms and relative to others. I scored the lowest on this measure, in the bottom 30th percentile. I would say that is surprising, as I think I am pretty happy.

I think similar to the Fordyce measure, there is a lot of room for variation in how different people would score the same subjective experience, and I think this could be culturally influenced.

Looking at the differences in the different measures, it seems clear to me that when I consider objective measures of my achievement and how well things have gone for me, I find myself quite satisfied with my life, but when I think in terms of emotionally how happy I am compared to others, and how much time I spend experiencing pleasure, my scores aren't so extreme. I think I could benefit from spending more time appreciating all the ways my life has gone well, and I could lean into those blessings. I think this could increase my day-to-day pleasure to have a bit more perspective on things.

I wasn't blown away by any of the measures presented here. Unsurprisingly, it seems to be pretty difficult to objectively measure the subjective experience of an individual, especially when you consider cross cultural differences in how the same subjective experience is expressed.