Abstract
Measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) are used to understand how people think and feel about their lives and experiences. But the measure used matters to conclusions about how well people’s lives are going. This research compares life evaluations and experienced SWB using nationally representative time use diaries, advancing previous research because diaries are less subject to recall biases than other, more popular methods. Analyses of over 20,000 US residents in 2012–2013 show life evaluations are more closely associated with positive and negative affect than experienced meaningfulness. Women have higher SWB than men except for negative affect, older age groups have higher SWB than middle age groups except for experienced meaningfulness, and younger age groups report the lowest experienced meaning. The unemployed have low life evaluations but experiences of SWB are similar across employment groups. A complete picture of SWB requires a complete set of measures.
Highlights
Subjective wellbeing (SWB) is a broad term for how people think about their lives and their everyday feelings (Diener et al 2003)
The relationship of the Ladder with happiness, negative affect and meaning is shown in Fig. 1 and Appendix Table 2
Someone’s happiness tells us more about their Ladder scores than does how meaningful they consider their activities to be or how much negative affect they experienced during them. This is consistent with previous work establishing that there is an affective component to evaluations (Pavot and Diener 1993b), but that they are different constructs
Summary
Subjective wellbeing (SWB) is a broad term for how people think about their lives and their everyday feelings (Diener et al 2003). People are often asked how satisfied they are with their life overall, or with specific life domains, such as work or relationships (Dolan et al 2008; Pavot and Diener 1993a). They may be asked whether their lives have meaning, or if they consider them worthwhile, which is often referred to as ‘eudemonic’ SWB (Aristotle 2002; Ryff and Keyes 1995)
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