Great point about the cross-cultural validity of depression diagnosis.
For that matter, I’d be awfully concerned about the cross-cultural (or cross-socioeconomic-group!) validity of life-satisfaction measures. Often they are asked something like so:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top.
The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (ladder-present)
On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now? (ladder-future)
There are obvious ways in which this question might cause someone to give, say, their life satisfaction as a percentile compared to people around them, rather than an absolutely comparable number, which would bias it up a lot for poor countries.
I’m not sure what an absolutely comparable number would be: people would have to be comparing themselves to the same unchanging criteria over time. The evidence, from the Easterlin Paradox etc. is that people do change their standards over time and largely seem work out how they are doing my comparing themselves against others. As such it looks like increasingly worldwide life satisfaction would be very hard.
I take these sorts of argument as reasons to move away from life satisfaction towards direct measures of people’s experience in the moment. I want to know how good or bad the person actually feels, not how well they they are doing against an arbitrary and changing standard.
Great point about the cross-cultural validity of depression diagnosis.
For that matter, I’d be awfully concerned about the cross-cultural (or cross-socioeconomic-group!) validity of life-satisfaction measures. Often they are asked something like so:
There are obvious ways in which this question might cause someone to give, say, their life satisfaction as a percentile compared to people around them, rather than an absolutely comparable number, which would bias it up a lot for poor countries.
I’m not sure what an absolutely comparable number would be: people would have to be comparing themselves to the same unchanging criteria over time. The evidence, from the Easterlin Paradox etc. is that people do change their standards over time and largely seem work out how they are doing my comparing themselves against others. As such it looks like increasingly worldwide life satisfaction would be very hard.
I take these sorts of argument as reasons to move away from life satisfaction towards direct measures of people’s experience in the moment. I want to know how good or bad the person actually feels, not how well they they are doing against an arbitrary and changing standard.