The Affective Profiles of Typical Experiences

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

In response to the "Improved Measures and Methodologies" topic (#24) of the NIA Pilot Research Grant Program Announcement, a study is proposed with the objective of developing and testing a new approach to the measurement of well-being. The uniqueness of this technique is that it will seek to assess well-being in terms that are closer to the utility or affective/hedonic quality and intensity of people' s diverse, subjective experiences, rather than in terms of their global retrospective satisfaction with their lives, which is the current practice. The proposed project will also permit an initial examination of the feasibility of this new survey measure for setting up a "National Well-Being Account" as an index of the welfare of society. Such an account would provide a much-needed supplement to the purely economic data that are currently used in the National Income and Products Account. To achieve these goals, a measure of experienced utility is needed. An earlier effort developed and tested a measure of experienced utility, the Day Recall Questionnaire (DRQ), which elicits reports of the experienced utility during a particular day in a respondent's life. While tile DRQ performs well, it is too cumbersome for use in large-scale surveys. We therefore propose to test a simpler questionnaire technique, which we call the Generic Situations Questionnaire (GSQ), that could capture the essential information obtained from the DRQ, yet be brief enough to be feasible for use in large surveys. In the proposed questionnaire, people are asked to evaluate generic situations (e.g., "Sunday moming", "commuting") rather the than specific events they happened to experience the day before. The proposed study will be conducted on a diverse sample of 500 adult women, who will complete both the GSQ and DRQ instruments. The key test of the feasibility of the GSQ will be its correspondence to the DRQ across differing situations and socio-economic circumstances (e.g., young/old, rich/poor, single/married/divorced).