Canada is the 6th happiest country in the world, but are you happy?

The UN has recently released the 2016 World Happiness Report, the 4th report after having recognized in its Assembly Resolution A/RES/66/281 in 2012 that “the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal”. Subjective well-being is considered essential to develop a more comprehensive measure of quality of life that goes beyond income and material conditions.

The UN used the OECD guidelines on measuring subjective well-being, which measures both positive and negative affect. There are, however, many other tests out there that claim to measure happiness or subjective well-being. The Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, a peer-reviewed academic article, rated the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire as the most downloaded test of subjective well-being, so I gave it a try.

Derived from the Oxford Happiness Inventory, it is a 29-item test that uses a uniform 6-point Likert scale to give an overall score between 1 and 6. If you take the test, they will send you an email with your happiness score along with a couple of links to exercises that are “proven” to increase happiness.

The recent shift of focus in psychology to account for the importance of “positive psychology” can be clearly seen in the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire; in other words, the focus is on the presence of positive affect and not the absence of negative affect. Using the Eigen-value criterion, the authors of the OHQ extracted 8 factors from a principal components analysis in their OHQ validation study: positive cognition, social commitment, positive affect, sense of control, physical fitness, satisfaction with self, mental alertness (Kashdan, 2003).

Although the questionnaire is unidimensional, has shown strong construct validity and high correlation with its predecessor, the Oxford Happiness Inventory, there was a problem with it. Some of the items have no direct relevance to subjective well-being. For example, it appears that the degree to which I am interested in other people (item 2), feel like I look attractive (item 13), and find beauty in things (item 16) have no theoretical models that include them as defining components of happiness (Kashdan, 2003). It is possible to argue that a lot of the items present in that test do not directly measure happiness, but measure correlates or consequences of happiness. For example, there is a high correlation between self-esteem and overall subjective well-being, but self-esteem is not necessarily a feature of subjective well-being. It is hard to see then why someone would take the 29-item questionnaire that does not directly measure happiness, when other available measures like the 4-item Subjective Happiness Scale, the 5-item Satisfaction with Life Scale, and the 18-item Well-Being Scale could offer a more reliable result.

References:

Kashdan, T. B. (2004). The assessment of subjective well-being (issues raised by the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire). Personality and Individual Differences, 36. Retrieved from http://mason.gmu.edu/~tkashdan/publications/happy.PDF