Comparing Well-being across Nations: Conceptual and Empirical Issues

• Main Authors: TOV, William, AU, Evelyn Wing-Mun
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Happiness; Psychological aspects; subjective well-being; Social Psychology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1149; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/2405/viewcontent/2013_TovAu.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In this chapter, we review cross-national survey studies of subjective well-being. We begin with a short history of the concept of subjective well-being and examine how it has been measured in national surveys. We then review some findings on well-being at the level of societies and individuals. The former concerns how the economic and social conditions of countries are related to their average level of happiness and life satisfaction. The latter considers how the characteristics of happy and unhappy individuals may differ across cultures. Next we discuss important issues in research design and analysis of cross-national data, and in the measurement of well-being across cultures. Advances in psychometrics and cross-cultural psychology have raised the standards for measuring constructs across cultures, and initial applications to well-being measures are examined. We close with an assessment of future directions for cross-national research on well-being.