Future Directions

to establish general conclusions about subjective well-being, by summarizing the findings of diverse studies, risky at best.

In an effort to move toward a more refined approach to subjective well-being assessment, Diener (2005) has proposed a set of guidelines and recommen-dations regarding the development and use of measures of both subjective well-being and ill-well-being, and these proposed standards have received the endorsement of many researchers involved in research related to subjective well-being. The guidelines include recommendations regarding the psychometric quality of sub-jective well-being measures and the methodology by which these measures might be most effectively employed, along with definitions of subjective well-being and its major components. The guidelines are intended to establish a basis for the development of national indicators of subjective well-being, but they are generally applicable to basic research settings as well.

Taken together, the three factors discussed above have combined to slow the establishment of a dependable and valid database from the findings of subjec-tive well-being research. General conclusions regarding the causes and conse-quences of subjective well-being have been slow to emerge, in part because many studies have only or narrowly assessed subjective well-being, because high-quality, multiple-method longitudinal studies are rare, and because of a lack of concerted effort by researchers to refine the assessment process.

Fortunately, remedies for all of these shortcomings are at hand. Valid and reliable measures and innovative methodologies, such as ESM, are currently available. Examples of systematic longitudinal designs have been published in recent years, and these studies can serve as a basis for future efforts. At least one attempt to organize and systematize subjective well-being assessment (Diener, 2005) has been made, and this effort appears to be well received. Thus, the potential to improve the quality of subjective well-being research and to more firmly establish the database seems good. Conducting high-quality, longitudinal research is neither cheap nor easy, but its value in terms of knowledge base is high. Cross-sectional studies can clearly serve an important function, particularly at the earliest stages of a program of research, but their power to fully explain the dynamic processes related to subjective well-being is limited.

The development of national indicators of subjective well-being for the United States, with the purpose of informing public policy decisions, is another likely area of future effort (Diener, 2000, 2005; Diener & Seligman, 2004).

These subjective indicators are proposed as a compliment to existing objective measures (e.g., economic indices) already in use. There is some evidence that subjective indicators may be superior to the heavily used economic indicators as quality-of-life assessments, particularly in affluent societies such as the United States (Diener & Seligman, 2004).

Along with increased efforts in applied areas, additional research on the basic processes related to subjective well-being is needed. Internal processes related to subjective well-being, such as the development of temperament-level traits (e.g., extraversion and neuroticism) need further explanation, as does the interaction of these personality processes with external, environmental factors. Another power-ful influence on subjective well-being is adaptation. Very little is known about adaptation or the processes that underlie it. Much work remains in the effort to more clearly articulate this powerful process, which has strong implications for the experience of subjective well-being.

In both basic and applied research settings, valid and reliable assessment instruments and innovative assessment methodologies will continue to play a key role. The creation of increasingly sophisticated and powerful measures will be required to meet the demands of future researchers. This development process has kept pace with the growing interest in subjective well-being in recent decades, and it appears likely that the evolution in subjective well-being assess-ment will continue.

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8

Measuring the Immeasurable

Psychometric Modeling of Subjective Well-Being Data

M

ICHAEL

E

ID

Many important insights into the structure, causes, and consequences of subjec-tive well-being can be gained only by measuring something that seems to be immeasurable to many people: satisfaction and happiness. The questions of whether, and in which way, subjective well-being can be measured has inter-ested researchers from different fields for many years. Many chapters of this hand-book address themes related to measurement issues and report the results of empirical studies that all have measured subjective well-being in a certain way.

Pavot (Chapter 7, this volume) gives an overview of the successes and shortfalls of the assessment of subjective well-being; his chapter discusses specific measure-ment devices that can be applied to assess subjective well-being. Like any other measure in the social and behavioral sciences, measures of subjective well-being have to prove their reliability and validity. This chapter demonstrates how mod-ern psychometric models can be applied to analyze subjective well-being data.

Based on a framework model of subjective well-being, I show how psychometric models can be applied to learn more about the structure of (1) general and domain-specific life satisfaction judgments and (2) the temporal structure of affect. The chapter focuses on models with latent variables that take into account that psychological constructs (such as subjective well-being) cannot be measured

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without measurement error. Different types of latent variable models offer differ-ent insights into the measuremdiffer-ent process and the reliability and validity of sub-jective well-being judgments.