The ‘gold standard’ for measuring happiness is the experience sampling method (ESM), where participants are prompted to record their feelings and possibly their activities one or more times a day.[1] While this is an accurate record of how people feel, it is expensive to implement and intrusive for respondents. A more viable approach is the day reconstruction method (DRM) where respondents use a time-diary to record and rate their previous day. DRM produces comparable results to ESM, but is less burdensome to use (Kahneman et al. 2004).
Further, I don’t think that fact happiness is subjective or timing-dependent is problematic: what I think matters is how pleasant/unpleasant people feel throughout the moments of their life. (In fact, this is the view Kahneman argued for in his 1999 paper ‘Objective happiness’.)
Hello Aaron,
In the ‘measuring happiness’ bit of HLI’s website we say
Further, I don’t think that fact happiness is subjective or timing-dependent is problematic: what I think matters is how pleasant/unpleasant people feel throughout the moments of their life. (In fact, this is the view Kahneman argued for in his 1999 paper ‘Objective happiness’.)