Vale Dr Happiness

Very sadly, Ed Diener, Ph.D. passed away on 27 April 2021, after a short battle with cancer.  Ed Diener was Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, the University of Utah, Distinguished Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois and Senior Scientist for the Gallup Organisation.  Also known as “Dr. Happiness”, Ed Diener is widely considered the pioneer of wellbeing research and has been a leader in the movement to use wellbeing metrics to help guide public policy.

When people describe what they most want out of life, happiness is almost always on the list, usually at the top.  When parents report what they want for their children, they frequently mention health and wealth, occasionally they mention fame or success.  But they almost always mention happiness “I just want my kids to be happy.”  In this sense, happiness is not just a fleeting emotion or an adrenaline-driven high, but a deeper state of satisfaction and fulfilment with one’s life.

Ed Diener coined the term subjective wellbeing (SWB) as the scientific definition for one’s own assessment of satisfaction with life and the extent to which you are fulfilling your potential and leading a life that you value.  He published his seminal work on subjective wellbeing in 1984.  This led to the introduction of the Satisfaction with Life Scale in 1985, which remains the most widely used measure for subjective wellbeing.

So, what’s it all about? The Satisfaction with Life Scale consists of five items. These are:

1. In most ways my life is close to my ideal,

2. The conditions of my life are excellent,

3. I am satisfied with my life,

4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life and;

5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

Each item is measured on a seven-point Likert scale of agreement from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Scores from the five items are aggregated or averaged to give a single overall wellbeing score.

Ed Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale is one of the cornerstones of Huber Social’s unique Wellbeing Measurement Framework.

We believe that the overarching goal of social impact is the collective wellbeing of people and place. In fact, from a moral perspective we believe that wellbeing should be the ultimate aim of all human activity.

The Huber Social Wellbeing Framework

While there are many other approaches to measuring wellbeing, we use the Satisfaction with Life Scale for some key reasons.

Firstly, it measures wellbeing directly rather than inferring it from secondary data such as income, education, health and so on, where the choice of these proxies is often contentious and usually culturally biased and normative.  This is founded on the belief that the measurement of Wellbeing must and can only be subjective. No-one else can look at you from the outside and tell you what your level of satisfaction with life is, or what drives your wellbeing, only you can do this. This is not to say that ‘objective’ data is unimportant in social impact measurement, but that it is not an accurate measure of someone’s state of wellbeing.  

Secondly, it provides a single overarching measure to track progress. Unlike approaches that use multiple proxies or components of Wellbeing, having a single metric provides guidance on how to maximise overall impact within the context of all the different facets of life. Is it better to focus on improving income or education or health, and what might be the consequence of prioritising one factor over another?  As the Satisfaction with Life Scale was developed to assess satisfaction with life as a whole, it allows people to consider what is most relevant to achieving their own subjective wellbeing.

Finally, the Satisfaction with Life Scale has been proven to be a valid and reliable instrument for measuring life satisfaction across a wide range of demographic groups and sectors. Its use is well established across many contexts and cultures, providing a survey scale that is both universally applicable and comparable. Thus, it fits beautifully with Huber Social’s work and global reach.

The Huber Social Wellbeing Measurement Framework has been designed to measure wellbeing and its drivers at an individual, community and national level.  It does this by combining Ed Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale as the overarching measure of impact, along with Nobel Prize winner Professor Amartya Sen’s Capability Development approach (which we will cover in the next article) into a wholistic framework to measure the drivers of wellbeing. Using a scientific approach this enables us to understand and quantify social impact in a consistent way, informing decision making on where to direct resources to improve levels of wellbeing in a community and around the world.

Huber Social’s Wellbeing Measurement Framework gives a voice to people who are more often lectured to than listened to. By asking people directly about the conditions of their lives we are better able to understand how initiatives and policies impact the Wellbeing of individuals and communities, and the factors that can contribute to improved wellbeing, in their specific context. Ed Diener’s legacy therefore lives on in the work of Huber Social, as it does in the efforts of the many other organisations around the world that also use the Satisfaction with Life Scale.

Vale Dr. Happiness.

See Ed Diener’s website for further information on his life’s work on subjective wellbeing.