Taking Happiness to a Whole New Level

Measuring happiness: an impossible task

How can one begin to measure something that cannot even be defined? How can you define something that varies across era and individuals? How can one begin to understand something that is personal and authentic to each individual? This is the challenge that many test developers face.

Happiness is a good example of such concept. Happiness, although everyone experiences it, can evolve over time, can alter with age and can vary across individuals. What made your grandmother happy 70 years ago is not the same as what makes her happy today and what makes her happy today does not necessarily make you happy. If we simply base happiness on an individual’s word how can we ever compare the level of happiness across people. A very extravert individual may be more prone to express happiness in comparison to someone who is shy. Both are as likely to experience happiness, but the rate of happiness they claim to experience may vary.

Regardless, of the multiple challenges facing the measurement of happiness, several have tried to construct tests to measure it. Certain researchers have use the approach of divide and conquer to tackle such challenges. Dembrun, Ricard, Després, Drelon, Gibelin, Loubeyre et al. (2012), have developed new scales assessing distinct dimensions of happiness. These authors proposed 2 types of happiness that can be differentiated. The first one is called fluctuating happiness, which represents a type of self-centered happiness, where one tries to maximize pleasure and avoid displeasure. On the other hand, they propose authentic-durable happiness which is governed by selflessness and is less dependent on upon circumstances but refers to the inner resources of the individual to be happy. To distinguish between these two types of happiness, the authors have invented a questionnaire composed of 10 and 13-item scale, respectively. However, can such a small amount of questions truly be enough to measure such a complex concept?

More recently, with the increase social network, a group of researchers have attempted to measure the geography of happiness based partially on Twitter. The study examined 10 million tweets gathered from 373 urban areas within the United States during the year 2011. To measure happiness, they collected the words used within the “tweet” and these individuals words were scored by users of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service on a scale of 1 to 9 giving each word an average happiness score. The study has found that a significant driver for happiness was the level of cursing found within that general urban area. They also found that happiness seemed to strongly correlate with wealth and negatively correlate with poverty. However, how reliable is this study that used social network to rate happiness level? Are we so desperate that we have turned to Twitter to be a reliable source to measure happiness?