The question of what constitutes the good life has been pondered for millennia. Yet only in the last decades has the study of well-being become a scientific endeavor. This book is based on the idea that we can empirically study quality of life and make cross-society comparisons of subjective well-being (SWB).A potential problem in studying SWB across societies is that of cultural relativism: if societies have different values, the members of those societies will use different criteria in evaluating the success of their society. By examining, however, such aspects of SWB as whether people...
The question of what constitutes the good life has been pondered for millennia. Yet only in the last decades has the study of well-being become a s...
The International Society for Quality of Life Studies held its first conference in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1997. Participants at the conference were allowed to submit their papers for the present volume. The submitted manuscripts went through a review and revision process, and the papers in this book represent the best articles from that process. Because the society sponsoring this volume is international in character, it is not sur prising that the 11 contributions are from 4 different countries: Canada (3), India (1), Netherlands (3), and the United States (4). Thus, the volume is...
The International Society for Quality of Life Studies held its first conference in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1997. Participants at the conference w...
The Sandvik, Diener, and Seidlitz (1993) paper is another that has received widespread attention because it documented the fact that self-report well-being scales correlate with a number of other methods of measuring the same concepts, such as with reports by knowledgeable informants (family and friends), expe- ence sampling measurement, and the memory for good versus bad life events. A single factor was found to underlie measures using different methods, and a n- ber of different well-being self-report measures were found to correlate with the non-self-report measures. Thus, although the...
The Sandvik, Diener, and Seidlitz (1993) paper is another that has received widespread attention because it documented the fact that self-report well-...
The Collected Works of Ed Diener, in 3 volumes, present the major works of the leading research scientist studying happiness and well-being. Professor Diener has studied subjective well-being, people's life satisfaction and positive emotions, for over a quarter of a century, and has published 200 works on the topic, many more than any other scholar. He has studied hundreds of thousands of people in over 140 nations of the world, and the Collected Works present the major findings from those studies. Diener has made many of the major discoveries about well-being, which are outlined in the...
The Collected Works of Ed Diener, in 3 volumes, present the major works of the leading research scientist studying happiness and well-being. Professor...
Major Theoretical Questions Theories about subjective well-being have grown over the past several decades, but have been re ned only slowly as adequate data have been compiled to test them. We can characterize the theories describing happiness along several dimensions. The rst dimension is whether the theory places the locus of happiness in external conditions such as income and status, as many sociological theories do, or within the attitudes and temperament of the individual, as many psychological theories do. Some have maintained that people adapt to all circumstances over time, so that...
Major Theoretical Questions Theories about subjective well-being have grown over the past several decades, but have been re ned only slowly as adequat...
