A balanced approach to the measurement of subjective well-being was recommended and adopted by ONS to reflect the distinct aspects outlined in the literature.5 This included life evaluation (a cognitive assessment of how life is going), positive affect (the experience of positive emotions) and negative affect (the experience of negative emotions), as recommended by the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi report. Also included, however, was a question looking at to what extent people felt that the activities in their lives were worthwhile. This question was taken from the eudaimonic perspective, which is concerned with positive functioning, “flourishing” and having a sense of meaning and purpose in life.6 The four experimental questions are therefore as follows: • Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? (evaluative) • Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile? (eudaimonic) • Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday? (experience – positive affect) • Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday? (experience – negative affect) (All asked using a 0 to 10 scale where 0 is “not at all” and 10 is “completely”)7
Further Testing and Development of Subjective Well-Being Measures Alongside the introduction of these questions in the constituent surveys of the Integrated Household Survey (the largest of which is the Annual Population Survey (APS)) ONS has also used the monthly Opinions Survey (OPN) to carry out further testing and development of these experimental subjective well-being questions. Estimates from the several months of the OPN and APS were published in December 2011 and February 2012 and show broadly similar results of overall subjective well-being of adults in the U.K.8 The benefit of the OPN is that this provides a vehicle from which additional subjective well-being questions can be asked and tested against one another. ONS has taken a modular approach each month by asking various questions from the different approaches to measuring subjective well-being, investigating how best to take into account wider societal aspects into subjective measurement, and just focusing on the individual’s views about their own well-being. This is important in its own right but also because it tests some of the proposed questions for the EU-SILC 2013 ad-hoc module on the measurement of well-being. The OPN not only allows for further collection of information that is not captured by the four overall questions, but allows for comparisons between the results from different questions, for example the differences between answers provided for the Cantril Ladder with the Life Satisfaction question. It has also provided the opportunity to undertake split sample trials to see how different questions, question wording, question order, response scales, mode of interview and use of show cards impact on the estimates that are derived. ONS reported on some of the results from this testing in December 2011, for example showing that the order in which positive and negative affect questions are asked can influence the results that respondents give and also how the mode of interview (self-complete using a laptop vs. the interviewer recording the answer themselves) can affect the estimates.9 Further testing in the other areas mentioned above is being undertaken and ONS plans to make the results of these tests available later in 2012. Alongside this quantitative testing, ONS has also been undertaking further cognitive testing of subjective well-being questions to better ascertain how respondents view them. 162
This research, along with other initiatives (for example OECD’s Guidelines on the Measurement of Subjective Wellbeing) may well lead to further refinement of the overall subjective well-being questions currently on the ONS surveys. ONS considers these as experimental statistics that are undergoing further testing and development, which have been published at an early stage to get feedback from users. Further investigation on the uses of these measures within the policy arena will be an important aspect of that work. One of the quality criteria that will be used to make an assessment on whether these statistics should become National Statistics is their relevance to customers. One of these areas is for the formulation and evaluation of policy for which there appears to be a promising interest within the U.K.10 However, it goes further than that, as there is likely to be an increasing