Hi MichaelPlant, [Edit: Jk—I don’t get the comment about my username/real name, I saw a mix being used on the forum, but I might have missed some etiquette—would you like my real name? Just ‘hello’ is fine if you’d prefer—no offence taken.]
Thanks so much for taking the time to read and respond! I was hoping to get more insight from people within EA who might be able to fill me in on some of the more philosophical/economic aspects as I’m aware these aren’t my areas of expertise (it was very much a ‘paper’ EA-hat I was trying on!) - I felt furthering my online searches wasn’t as helpful as getting more insight into the underlying concepts from experts and hoped my post would at least show I was interested in hearing more. Thanks for the links as well—I did come across a few of them in my approach to this work, but will take your advice these are worth looking at again if you think I’ve not appraised them properly—you definitely know best in this regard!
Also, apologies—you might be right in saying I didn’t structure a paragraph very well if it has left anyone with the impression I was suggesting subjective wellbeing research has only been in existance since COVID. My own graph disproves this, for starters! I think it’s this paragraph from the first section I’ve not phrased well (italics added).
From my quick literature review, the interest in wellbeing as a research area is a relatively recent phenomenon. There has been rapid growth in papers being published about subjective wellbeing from around 2020 onwards. I’d guess this is due to (1) the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown restrictions making this a hugely important topic for public health officials and politicians, and (2) the recent interest in using wellbeing as an outcome when evaluating the effect of a broad range of policy decisions, which has subsequently driven interest in quantifying ‘wellbeing’ for use in cost-impact analyses.
I was trying to emphasise the relatively steep growth in interest over the last few years due to questions about cost-effectiveness (e.g. WELLBY), which as you mention is ‘barely older than COVID’. I don’t actually think we disagree here so I’ll need to think how to rephrase it to avoid conflating this with SWB research as a whole—to be clear, I don’t think your reading of this was unfair and I can phrase it better.
I’m not too sure I was ever arguing I was doing an exhaustive literature review (?) - I felt I stated a few times this was non-scientific, should have no weight, etc. My goal was just trying to get a quick overview as more of a sense-check, but didn’t want to limit my reading to the first x number of pages in case that was biased—I chose very limited terms and stated them so it would be clear how I did the search, which allowed you to double-check I wasn’t pulling anything dishonest (impressive that 7 papers have been added since I did the search last week—clearly there is a lot of interest!). If I set out to do a completely exhaustive review, you’re right to suggest the terms you did (I would add “SWB” as well), but I’m not sure that would be a reasonable expectation of something like an “abstract-only” non-academic review from a visitor with a full-time job when that returns thousands of results...
I’m sorry if it appeared that selecting limited search terms was an attempt to ‘downplay’ SWB research as a field—I mentioned it was my time constraints that were the problem but it’s easy to miss in a long post. I felt I was trying to explain throughout how interesting/useful I found this piece of work, spoke about how it changed my mind in the later sections and identified blind-spots I wasn’t aware I had. I don’t think I was critical of ‘subjective wellbeing’ research as whole—I tried to lay out my very specific concerns very clearly (e.g. in “life satisfaction” being used as an isolated measure for subjective wellbeing) but my overall conclusion was in support of finding a way to incorporate more of the diverse value these researchers were adding to the understanding of how we think about wellbeing estimates e.g. other measures, combining measures, qualitiative research, etc. I was approaching the problem with an open mind and left the exercise positively so I’m sorry to see it might have appeared mal-intentioned.
I hope this doesn’t seem like nit-picking, and it’s not intended as criticism of you personally as you similarly were upfront about not being familiar with PubMed; it can be tricky to get to grips with, but it might be helpful to share a quick point.
For the search that you linked that returned 150k results—if you go to “Advanced” under the search bar and click through you can see this searched “All Fields” and expanded the terms you used as they weren’t in quotation marks (it’s a quirk of the database that perhaps isn’t true for others!). This was the actual search run from your link—for all I know this was your intent, but in case it wasn’t (just judging this as a possibility based on the hyperlink):
With quotations to limit results to those specific terms (I’m not sure if that was your intent) and using Title/Abstract (PubMed also doesn’t really like hyphens as you see above but I used “subjective well” to try and work around this) you get more like 20-30k results. You can use MeSH terms (key words instead), other variations, etc to push it up or down (I tried a few variations to work with ‘well-being’ hence this being #8). And as you rightly say, you can always add more terms to include more papers.
Again, my aim isn’t to down-play SWB research at all with this point (I like the field!), it’s just in case it’s helpful as I use PubMed all the time and it’s one of many databases which contains mental health literature. Whether 2k or 150k+ results (even a few well-written papers wouldn’t necessarily be an argument against the field—it just suggests to me it’s new), I still stand by my OP in being broadly positive about the area as a whole, hence coming up with a framework of my own in inspiration, I just haven’t shifted much in my specific critiques of certain applications of specific aspects of SWB but I’ll have a read of your links and see if it changes my mind! Similarly, if you had any further thoughts, I’d appreciate hearing them for your feedback.
Hi MichaelPlant, [Edit: Jk—I don’t get the comment about my username/real name, I saw a mix being used on the forum, but I might have missed some etiquette—would you like my real name? Just ‘hello’ is fine if you’d prefer—no offence taken.]
Thanks so much for taking the time to read and respond! I was hoping to get more insight from people within EA who might be able to fill me in on some of the more philosophical/economic aspects as I’m aware these aren’t my areas of expertise (it was very much a ‘paper’ EA-hat I was trying on!) - I felt furthering my online searches wasn’t as helpful as getting more insight into the underlying concepts from experts and hoped my post would at least show I was interested in hearing more. Thanks for the links as well—I did come across a few of them in my approach to this work, but will take your advice these are worth looking at again if you think I’ve not appraised them properly—you definitely know best in this regard!
Also, apologies—you might be right in saying I didn’t structure a paragraph very well if it has left anyone with the impression I was suggesting subjective wellbeing research has only been in existance since COVID. My own graph disproves this, for starters! I think it’s this paragraph from the first section I’ve not phrased well (italics added).
I was trying to emphasise the relatively steep growth in interest over the last few years due to questions about cost-effectiveness (e.g. WELLBY), which as you mention is ‘barely older than COVID’. I don’t actually think we disagree here so I’ll need to think how to rephrase it to avoid conflating this with SWB research as a whole—to be clear, I don’t think your reading of this was unfair and I can phrase it better.
I’m not too sure I was ever arguing I was doing an exhaustive literature review (?) - I felt I stated a few times this was non-scientific, should have no weight, etc. My goal was just trying to get a quick overview as more of a sense-check, but didn’t want to limit my reading to the first x number of pages in case that was biased—I chose very limited terms and stated them so it would be clear how I did the search, which allowed you to double-check I wasn’t pulling anything dishonest (impressive that 7 papers have been added since I did the search last week—clearly there is a lot of interest!). If I set out to do a completely exhaustive review, you’re right to suggest the terms you did (I would add “SWB” as well), but I’m not sure that would be a reasonable expectation of something like an “abstract-only” non-academic review from a visitor with a full-time job when that returns thousands of results...
I’m sorry if it appeared that selecting limited search terms was an attempt to ‘downplay’ SWB research as a field—I mentioned it was my time constraints that were the problem but it’s easy to miss in a long post. I felt I was trying to explain throughout how interesting/useful I found this piece of work, spoke about how it changed my mind in the later sections and identified blind-spots I wasn’t aware I had. I don’t think I was critical of ‘subjective wellbeing’ research as whole—I tried to lay out my very specific concerns very clearly (e.g. in “life satisfaction” being used as an isolated measure for subjective wellbeing) but my overall conclusion was in support of finding a way to incorporate more of the diverse value these researchers were adding to the understanding of how we think about wellbeing estimates e.g. other measures, combining measures, qualitiative research, etc. I was approaching the problem with an open mind and left the exercise positively so I’m sorry to see it might have appeared mal-intentioned.
I hope this doesn’t seem like nit-picking, and it’s not intended as criticism of you personally as you similarly were upfront about not being familiar with PubMed; it can be tricky to get to grips with, but it might be helpful to share a quick point.
For the search that you linked that returned 150k results—if you go to “Advanced” under the search bar and click through you can see this searched “All Fields” and expanded the terms you used as they weren’t in quotation marks (it’s a quirk of the database that perhaps isn’t true for others!). This was the actual search run from your link—for all I know this was your intent, but in case it wasn’t (just judging this as a possibility based on the hyperlink):
With quotations to limit results to those specific terms (I’m not sure if that was your intent) and using Title/Abstract (PubMed also doesn’t really like hyphens as you see above but I used “subjective well” to try and work around this) you get more like 20-30k results. You can use MeSH terms (key words instead), other variations, etc to push it up or down (I tried a few variations to work with ‘well-being’ hence this being #8). And as you rightly say, you can always add more terms to include more papers.
Again, my aim isn’t to down-play SWB research at all with this point (I like the field!), it’s just in case it’s helpful as I use PubMed all the time and it’s one of many databases which contains mental health literature. Whether 2k or 150k+ results (even a few well-written papers wouldn’t necessarily be an argument against the field—it just suggests to me it’s new), I still stand by my OP in being broadly positive about the area as a whole, hence coming up with a framework of my own in inspiration, I just haven’t shifted much in my specific critiques of certain applications of specific aspects of SWB but I’ll have a read of your links and see if it changes my mind! Similarly, if you had any further thoughts, I’d appreciate hearing them for your feedback.