[Caveat I’m not an expert on this topic, just interested]
I think if people make their scales consistent with others they speak to, and use that same scale across time, for that to not imply similar scales across generations would mean that people don’t really speak to people outside of their generation. Which could be plausible, I’m not really sure. It seems like a relatively heavy lift to ask someone “Hey, could you make sure the best and worst life you reference is the same as your grandparents?”
But really I think what we need is more data! We can speculate til the cows come home.
(i.e. I don’t even know what it would mean for your function to be linear)
That people attach equal value to each unit change in a scale?
And indeed people could change functions over time while keeping those 0 and 10 pegs fixed.
That’d be pretty odd, wouldn’t it? I think it’s likelier that the scale stretches or shifts instead of the reporting function changing.
I would change my mind more fully that scale norming is not occuring if I saw evidence that experience-sampling type measures of affect also did not change over the course of decades as countries become/became wealthier (and earned more leisure time etc).
Why do you think that ESM scales wouldn’t change over the course of time if other scales did? Alas, I’m not sure this data exists. I think the closest thing is looking at time use data. Using time use happiness data Han & Kaiser (2021) seem to suggest that Americans are a tiny tiny bit happier since the 80s?
I’d also change my mind if I saw some experiment where people were asked to rate how their lives were going in relation to some shared reference point(s), such as other people’s lives descibed in a good amount of detail, and where people’s ratings of how their lives were going relative to those reference points also didn’t change as countries became significantly wealthier.
Interesting point. What about if there was evidence that people across ages tended to use subjective wellbeing scales in similar ways?
[Caveat I’m not an expert on this topic, just interested]
I think if people make their scales consistent with others they speak to, and use that same scale across time, for that to not imply similar scales across generations would mean that people don’t really speak to people outside of their generation. Which could be plausible, I’m not really sure. It seems like a relatively heavy lift to ask someone “Hey, could you make sure the best and worst life you reference is the same as your grandparents?”
But really I think what we need is more data! We can speculate til the cows come home.
That people attach equal value to each unit change in a scale?
That’d be pretty odd, wouldn’t it? I think it’s likelier that the scale stretches or shifts instead of the reporting function changing.
Why do you think that ESM scales wouldn’t change over the course of time if other scales did? Alas, I’m not sure this data exists. I think the closest thing is looking at time use data. Using time use happiness data Han & Kaiser (2021) seem to suggest that Americans are a tiny tiny bit happier since the 80s?
Interesting point. What about if there was evidence that people across ages tended to use subjective wellbeing scales in similar ways?