I tried experience sampling myself for about a year and a half (intro, conclusion) and it made me much more skeptical of the system. I’m just not that sure how happy I am at any given point:
When I first started rating my happiness on a 1-10 scale I didn’t feel like I was very good at it. At the time I thought I might get better with practice, but I think I’m actually getting worse at it. Instead of really thinking “how do I feel right now?” it’s really hard not to just think “in past situations like this I’ve put down ‘6’ so I should put down ‘6’ now”.
And:
I don’t have my phone ping me during the night, because I don’t want it to wake me up. Before having a kid this worked properly: I’d plug in my phone, which turns off pings, promptly fall asleep, wake up in the morning, unplug my phone. Now, though, my sleep is generally interrupted several times a night. Time spent waiting to see if the baby falls back asleep on her own, or soothing her back to sleep if she doesn’t, or lying awake at 4am because it’s hard to fall back asleep when you’ve had 7hr and just spent an hour walking around and bouncing the baby; none of these are counted. On the whole, these experiences are much less enjoyable than my average; if the baby started sleeping through the night such that none of these were needed anymore I wouldn’t see that as a loss at all. Which means my data is biased upward. I’m curious how happiness sampling studies have handled this; people with insomnia would be in a similar situation.
I agree that DALY/QALY measurements aren’t great either, though.
Instead of really thinking “how do I feel right now?” it’s really hard not to just think “in past situations like this I’ve put down ‘6’ so I should put down ‘6’ now”.
Interesting. I’ve done experience-sampling to track my mood for about 3 years, and haven’t noticed this dynamic. (It generally feels like I’m answering the question “how do I feel right now?”)
Just another data point.
Before having a kid this worked properly...
This is a great point. I don’t have children & this hasn’t been a problem for me. Totally makes sense that this comes up once you’re a parent.
I agree that DALY/QALY measurements aren’t great either, though.
My intuition is that aggregating the results of the two methods would outperform either method individually, because they skew in different directions.
I tried experience sampling myself for about a year and a half (intro, conclusion) and it made me much more skeptical of the system. I’m just not that sure how happy I am at any given point:
And:
I agree that DALY/QALY measurements aren’t great either, though.
Interesting. I’ve done experience-sampling to track my mood for about 3 years, and haven’t noticed this dynamic. (It generally feels like I’m answering the question “how do I feel right now?”)
Just another data point.
This is a great point. I don’t have children & this hasn’t been a problem for me. Totally makes sense that this comes up once you’re a parent.
My intuition is that aggregating the results of the two methods would outperform either method individually, because they skew in different directions.