The Happiness Analyzer – Developing a New Technique for Measuring Subjective Well-Being

Abstract

In 2013 the OECD published a guideline for measuring subjective well-being in greater detail to collect data in the quality needed as a basis for efficient decisions to improve subjective well-being and the evaluation of those decisions to enable continuous learning. Unfortunately, many studies do not measure subjective well-being according to this standard, as traditional methods (e.g., paper and pencil or personal interviews) require considerable resources (from both researchers and participants) to capture i) people’s subjective well-being at multiple points in time using general questionnaires; ii) people’s everyday life and everyday feelings; iii) people’s specific feelings in the moment; and iv) a combination of subjective and objective well-being measurements. To resolve this issue, we developed an app as a mobile assessment tool, the “Happiness Analyzer” which is outlined in this paper. This app can be used to measure subjective well-being and community well-being in community projects which has been shown in case studies in Frankfurt or Wuppertal, Germany.