Metrics of Subjective Well-Being: Limits and Improvements

This volume analyses the quantification of the effect of factors measuring subjective well-being, and in particular on the metrics applied. With happiness studies flourishing over the last decades, both in number of publications as well as in their exposure, researchers working in this field are aware of potential weaknesses and pitfalls of these metrics. Contributors to this volume reflect on different factors influencing quantification, such as scale size, wording, language, biases, and cultural comparability in order to raise awareness on the tools and on their conditions of use.

About the Author

Gaël Brulé(PhD) is a post-doc researcher in happiness studies at Erasmus University of Rotterdam. His areas of expertise are cross-national and cross-cultural comparison and comparability of happiness. Filomena Maggino is professor of Social Statistics at the University of Florence (Italy) and chief of the Laboratory of Statistics for Research in Social and Educational field. In the field of statistics applied to social research, her twenty-year research covers mainly data (i) production (with particular reference to subjective data assessment), (ii) analysis (with particular reference to multivariate analysis, scaling models and composite indicator construction), and presentation and dissemination (with particular reference to defining a model aimed at assessing the quality of communication in statistics). Her research interests aim at seeing these topics in the perspective of quality of life assessment.