This chapter examined the structural relations among various components of subjective well-being. These components can be divided roughly into cognitive components (LS and DS) and affective components (PA and NA). This chapter revealed numerous robust structural relations among these components. DS and LS are highly correlated even after controlling for shared method effects and common influences of personality traits. At least some of this relation is due to bottom-up influences of DS on LS. Thus, changes in DS are likely to produce changes in LS. It is also possible that top-down processes contribute to the LS–
DS correlation, although evidence for top-down effects is less conclusive. On the affective side, PA and NA are separable components of subjective well-being with distinct causes, although they may not be strictly independent, especially in momentary assessments of affect. Personality traits, especially neuroticism and extraversion, appear to have a stronger influence on the affective component of subjective well-being than the cognitive component. Indeed, the relation between personality and the cognitive component of subjective well-being is often fully mediated by the affective component, presumably because people rely on the affective component to judge LS. In contrast, DS is a stronger determi-nant of LS than affective well-being. The review also revealed the need for more powerful research designs to elucidate the causal processes underlying the struc-ture of subjective being. Longitudinal studies that reveal changes in well-being, in combination with dyadic designs that allow separating personality/
genetic from situational/environmental influences, are especially promising (Nes, Roysamb, Tambs, Harris, & Reichborn-Kjennerud, 2006; Schimmack & Lucas, 2007).
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7
The Assessment
of Subjective Well-Being
Successes and Shortfalls
W
ILLIAMP
AVOTResearch on happiness, or subjective well-being, has emerged as an important area of focus for psychology in the new millennium. A significant and growing number of researchers have broken away from the field’s preoccupation with depression, anxiety, and disorder (Myers, 2000), choosing instead to devote their attention to “positive psychology” (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 5). As interest in subjective well-being and related constructs has grown, so too has the demand for instruments and methodologies designed to assess these constructs.
To a large extent, progress in the development of valid measures and meth-odologies has kept pace with the increases in demand. Relative to the early days of subjective well-being research (Diener, 1984), the array of measures and research methods available to contemporary researchers is impressive. The sophistication and reliability of subjective well-being measures has increased sub-stantially. Innovative methodologies now allow researchers to develop multi-method designs that overcome many of the shortcoming and weaknesses of ear-lier single-method studies.
In the midst of a successful period of development, however, some shortfalls must be noted as well. Despite the substantial advances in subjective well-being
124
assessment, the development of a broadly based, consistent, and comprehensive empirical database of subjective well-being findings has been realized only par-tially. A number of factors, such as an overreliance on single-method, cross-sectional designs and the use of narrow measures that provide only a partial assessment of subjective well-being, have combined to limit the generality of the findings from individual studies.
In the initial sections of this chapter, general issues related to the definition and assessment of subjective well-being are discussed and examples of current measures of subjective well-being are reviewed. Later sections of the chapter focus on alternative measures and methodologies, the limitations of the current subjective well-being database, and a discussion of the future issues and directions of subjective well-being research.