Journal Session on the Measurement of Well-Being

The online journal club is starting up again today at 2pm.

A link to the sessions from earlier in the year:

http://economicspsychologypolicy.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=journal+club
 

Todays session will focus on well-being measurement and examine recent papers aiming to validate the Day Reconstruction Method Survey - a retrospective measure of time use, social interaction, and emotional experience.
 

 

The four papers that will be covered are:  
 

 

Bylsma, L. M., Taylor-Clift, A., & Rottenberg, J. (2011). Emotional reactivity to daily events in

major and minor depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 120(1),155-167.

 
 

 

Dockray, S., Grant, N., A. A., Kahneman, D., Wardle, J., & Steptoe, A. (2010). A comparison of affect ratings obtained with ecological momentary assessment and the Day ReconsctructionMethod. Social Indicators Research, 99, 269-283.

 

 

 

Kim, J., et al. (2012). Systematic comparison between ecological momentary assessment and day reconstruction method for fatigue and mood states in healthy adults. British Journal of Health Psychology. doi: 10.1111/bjhp.12000.

 

 

Miret, M., Caballero, F.F., Mathur, A., Naidoo, N,. Kowal, P., et al. (2012). Validation of a measure of subjective well-being: an abbreviated version of the Day Reconstruction Method. PLoS ONE, 7(8): e43887. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0043887

 

 

 

Some of the questions we will address are listed below:

What is well-being, why is it interesting?

- Evaluative, eudaimonic, affective components

- Increasing political & academic interest as a metric of progress

What are the main approaches to measuring well-being?

- ‘Objective’well-being measures– frontal lobe asymmetry, prevalence of risk genes, biological measures of stress.

- Quality of life encompasses a broader set of measures including environmental factors, education, social life and so on.

- Self-report questionnaires with various formats, contexts, protocols.

What is the Day Reconstruction Method and what does it add to existing measures of well-being?

- Time use and experience sampling

- Non-invasive, less burdensome than Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA)

- Suitable for population use (across education levels)

- Continuous quantitative description of daily experience

Has the Day Reconstruction Method been validated?

- Test-retest reliability (Krueger & Schkade, 2008; Miret et al., 2012)

- Comparison with EMA (Dockray et al., 2010; Bylsma et al., 2011; Kim et al., 2012)

- Link to physiological activity (Daly et al., 2010)