Citation

Hudson NW, Anusic I, Lucas RE, Donnellan MB. Assessment 2020; 27(1): 102-116.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1073191117744660

PMID

29254354 PMCID

Abstract

Self-report measures of global well-being are thought to reflect the overall quality of people's lives. However, several scholars have argued that people rely on heuristics, such as current mood, when reporting their global well-being. Experiential well-being measures, such as the day reconstruction method (DRM), have been proposed as an alternative technique to obtain a potentially more accurate assessment of well-being. Across two multimethod, short-term longitudinal studies, we compared the psychometric properties of global self-reports and short-form DRM-based assessments of well-being. We evaluated their stability across one month, tested their convergent validity using self-informant agreement, and evaluated correlations with personality traits.

RESULTS indicated that global measures of well-being were more stable than DRM-based experiential measures. Self-informant agreement was also either equal across global and DRM measures or higher for global measures. Correlations with personality were similar across approaches. These findings suggest that DRM and global measures of well-being have similar psychometric properties when used to provide an overall assessment of a person's typical level of subjective well-being.

Language: en

Keywords

Adolescent; Adult; day reconstruction method; Female; Humans; Male; Michigan; Middle Aged; Personal Satisfaction; Personality; Personality Tests; Quality of Life; reliability; Reproducibility of Results; Self Report; stability; Students; subjective well-being; Universities; validity; Young Adult