This excerpt from. Culture and Subjective Well-Being. Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh, editors The MIT Press.

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1 This excerpt from Culture and Subjective Well-Being. Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh, editors The MIT Press. is provided in screen-viewable form for personal use only by members of MIT CogNet. Unauthorized use or dissemination of this information is expressly forbidden. If you have any questions about this material, please contact

2 1 Measuring Subjective Well-being to Compare the Quality of Life of Cultures Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh The question of what is the ``good life'' has been contemplated for millennia. The classic Greek philosophers concluded that the good life resides in virtue. Similarly the Confucian schoolin ancient China described the good life in terms of an orderly society in which individuals correctly performed their roles and responsibilities. The Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham characterized the good life as one replete with happiness and pleasure, and the desirable society as one that maximizes pleasure for all people. Although the search for the ingredients of quality of life is ancient, only in the last decades has the empirical study of well-being become a systematic scienti c endeavor. The present volume is devoted to the idea that we can empirically study quality of life and make comparisons of the subjective well-being (SWB) of societies. It is unclear whether we will ever be able to conclude in a de nitive way that one society is better than another in terms of overall quality of life because this judgment is so dependent on values. We can conclude, however, which societies have greater subjective well-beingðpeople in them evaluate their lives in positive terms. Someday it may be possible to make cross-cultural comparisons of subjective well-being with a degree of certitude. In confronting the question of the good life and the successful society, we encounter the vexatious question of cultural relativism. If societies have different sets of values, people in them are likely to consider different criteria relevant when judging the success of their society. In one community equality may be most important, for example, whereas in another location more weight may be placed on economic prosperity. In yet another culture love might be considered most important. Thus people in various nations might consider their own society to be better than the others because they use a criterion on which their nation is performing well. The concept of cultural relativism thus points to the need for internal standards when judging societiesðare citizens able to accomplish their own values and goals, and

3 4 Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh therefore judge their own lives and community to be successful based on their own standards? In this approach, an unsuccessful culture is one that possesses values and goals that it fails to reach. Because people who cannot attain their values and goals are likely to be less satis ed and happy, it is likely that measures of subjective wellbeing to some degree represent a judgment of the culture from an internal perspective, from the viewpoint of the members of that society. Therefore, if we assess various aspects of subjective well-being such as whether people believe they are living correctly, whether they enjoy their lives, whether important others think they are living well, as well as whether they possess a sense of ful llment, we may have one set of measures by which we can compare the success of societies. In other words, SWB can represent the degree to which people in each society are accomplishing the values they hold dear. Some might argue that subjective well-being is just one value among many, competing with all the others in an endless cacophony of competing concerns. There are reasons to argue, however, that subjective well-being has a privileged place at the table. First, societies throughout the world are becoming increasingly democratized, and subjective well-being is a particularly democratic scalar. It is based on the idea that how each person thinks and feels about his or her life is important. It is not just the opinion of a power elite, or an intellectual class, or psychologists who are experts on ``mental health'' but through the standards and values chosen by the person herself that societies are evaluated. Second, SWB can take people's values into account, and give a summary of whether their lives ful ll these standards, because individuals' own views of their well-being re ect their values. Thus SWB can re ect success at achieving the numerous values that people seek. Finally, subjective well-being includes components that are dependent on pleasure and the ful llment of basic human needs, but also includes people's ethical and evaluative judgments of their lives. Thus SWB re ects to some degree how much people are living in accord with evolutionary imperatives and human needs, but also represents judgments based on the particular norms and values of each culture. Measures of subjective well-being that are dependent on happiness and pleasure might be necessary in fully evaluating the quality of life of societies, but they will never be suf cient (see Diener and Suh 1997; Diener, Sapyta, and Suh 1998) because all people have values in addition to hedonism and satisfaction. We hope for low infant mortality, a degree of human equality, and respect for nature, regardless of whether these things will make people happier or more satis ed. Further we want to achieve subjective well-being through our relationships and attainment of goals and values,

4 Measuring Subjective Well-being to Compare Quality oflife 5 not simply from drugs. Thus a full set of measures of SWB will include judgments of whether people are living the ``good life'' from the frame of reference of that society, and include evaluative judgments that go beyond hedonism. The degree to which subjective well-being arises from meeting inherent human needs versus from acquiring cultural imperatives is an issue that is not yet resolved. In either case, subjective well-being is one outcome measure by which to judge successful living. We need criteria by which to determine whether humans are living in accord with ``human nature''ðwhat better place to start than whether people feel happy and satis ed. A problem with an unswerving cultural relativism is that every outcome is as good as every other; a Hitler is judged to be as good as Francis of Assisi. In this view, every type of life is equally desirable depending on the framework for evaluation. While respecting many differences between cultures, we reject all-out cultural relativism because it is too accepting of terrible people and sick societies. But in rejecting complete cultural relativism, we must have some criteria by which societies can be judged. We agree with Edgerton (1992) that human health and happiness are two good standards with which to start in judging a society, and we would add the long-term well-being of the planet and the happiness of people in other communities as two other standards. We may discover that there are many types of good societies that can produce happy citizens. Just because diverse societies can be good, however, does not mean that all societies are good. There can be bad societies that produce bad outcomes on many dimensions (e.g., see Edgerton 1992). Cultural relativism points us to the idea that there are alternative paths that can accommodate human needs and desires, but we cannot take this to mean that all institutional arrangements are equally good. We may discover that some types of societies are inferior in producing health and happiness. Methodological Issues When examining subjective well-being, a number of thorny methodological issues arise, and these concerns are exacerbated when the researcher wants to formulate conclusions that are generalizable across cultures (for a comprehensive discussion, see Vijver and Leung 1997). First, the question of measurement: Do the subjective well-being scales yield scores that are comparable across individuals and societies? Most extant evidence on this issue is encouraging. For example, Sandvik, Diener, and Seidlitz (1993) found that self-report SWB scales correlated well with a number

5 6 Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh of non-self-report measures of well-being such as informant reports, experience sampling, smiling, memory measures, and interviews. Balatsky and Diener (1993) found that memory measures, in which people must remember good versus bad events from their lives, yielded scores that converged with self-reports of SWB collected in the former Soviet Union and in the United States. Thus there are some limited data from other measures of SWB besides global self-reports, but these alternative forms of assessment must be utilized much more frequently in crosscultural research. We may also be nearing the time when biological measures such as hormone assays, evoked potentials, and brain imaging can also produce measures of happiness. Although subjective well-being is of course experiential, this does not mean that self-report need be the only measure of the experience. We will nd ourselves standing on more rm ground if we nd that our conclusions converge across measurement methods. Currently virtually all of the conclusions in this book, save several notable studies, are based solely on global self-report measures, and thus our inferences must be accepted with caution at this time. Questions arise about measurement artifacts when conducting cross-cultural studies. A major question is whether translation into different languages might in uence research results. Ouweneel and Veenhoven (1991) review evidence from countries in which more than one language are spoken, showing that the SWB scores across language groups are similar. Shao (1993) administered our life satisfaction scale to bilingual individuals in both Mandarin Chinese and English, and found much the same results regardless of language. Despite the encouraging ndings, more research needs to be performed in this area. Not only is translation an issue, but the comparability of well-being concepts across cultures is an important consideration. In order to explore this issue, we will need to compare emic measures that are created in diverse communities and administer them in other cultures, explore the semantic evaluations of the measurement concepts, and so forth. This, in combination with the addition of non-self-report measures, should yield a theoretical network to help understand the meaning of the self-report measures across societies. Other self-report artifacts have also been explored across cultures. Diener, Suh, Smith, and Shao (1995) examined whether humility produced lower subjective well-being scores in the East Asian cultures compared to the United States. They used several strategies for analyzing this question, including examining scores for domains in which the respondent was more or was less responsible. They found

6 Measuring Subjective Well-being to Compare Quality oflife 7 little evidence that humility was a signi cant in uence on responding. Several potentialartifacts were explored such as the differentialuse of extreme numbers, and little evidence was found that these artifacts produce the national differences in SWB. Diener et al. (1999) did nd evidence, however, that satisfaction scales might have a somewhat different meaning between cultures, related to a global positivity response tendency. Whereas individuals in western cultures were slightly more positive about concrete, narrow domains of their lives, they were much more positive about the broader domains that subsumed the narrower ones. Further this difference tended to predict the life satisfaction of nations. It suggested to the authors that two forms of SWBÐone based on a bottom-up consideration of one's objective life circumstances, and another following a top-down evaluation of one's overall lifeð are differentially in uenced by a positivity disposition that varies across individuals and across cultures. Disposition toward positivity does not have as large an in uence on a person's satisfaction with narrow life domains, which might be more grounded in concrete reality, as on global ratings in which there is more latitude of judgment. This set of ndings obviously requires replication and future research, but represents a provocative possible interpretation of some of the differences in SWB reports across cultures. Diener and Oishi (chapter 8 this volume) report one methodological nding that is troubling. They found that various self-report items produce somewhat different scaling of the SWB of nations. This nding is troubling in part because we have virtually no understanding of how various questions or response options might produce different scores for various nations. Item response theory applied to scales across cultures may help address this question, as will focus groups and interviews combined with the existing scales. Statistics such as latent class analysis (Eid and Diener 1999) might also help in comparing responses across cultures. Besides issues of measurement, there are additionalmethodologicalquestions that must be addressed. One is the issue of causality. In most of the cross-sectional research reviewed in this book, one-time cross-sectionalresearch is used, and thus it is impossible to draw conclusions about causal direction. In rare circumstances actual experiments have been conducted, and a few longitudinal or panel studies also exist that give us some hints about causaldirection. Much more work, however, needs to be accomplished in this area, and most statements in this book must be quali ed by the fact that they are both correlational and cross-sectional.

7 8 Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh A further methodological and conceptual complication is de ning and measuring the cultural and societal variables that predict well-being. In some cases we have relatively objective indicators for nations such as GNP per capita and infant mortality rates, although these measures do differ in quality and subjectivity. For example, measures of GNP include some products and services of a society and purposefully exclude others (e.g., housework). Further, when we examine predictor variables such as freedom, it is not always clear exactly which variables should be measured, and often no single variable is a completely valid index of an underlying construct. For example, what measures are best in terms of indicating equality between the sexes in nations? Sampling is another topic that invariably arises in discussions of methodology. Although some of the studies of SWB reviewed in this publication relied on samples of college students that are typical in psychological research, the area of SWB is fortunate to have its roots in survey research. Thus many of the surveys in the eld are based on large probability samples of nations. Originally, the sample of nations for which SWB data were available was small, and most studies came from highly industrialized western countries. In recent years, however, larger samples of nations are available (and the diversity of countries employed in these modern studies can be seen in chapter 7 by Inglehart and Klingemann). Nevertheless, very poor countries such as those in Africa are still underrepresented. In addition preliterate societies are virtually absent from this area of study, and this is especially unfortunate for a volume on cross-cultural differences. A nalmethodologicaltopic is the use of process measures to understand how reports of SWB are generated. For example, What information is used when respondents formulate their responses to life satisfaction scales (e.g., Suh and Diener 1999)? Related to this issue, we need procedures by which we can assess the in uence of memory biases in mood reports, determine the in uence of impression management in responding, and assess the impact of current events and mood on the responses given. For example, Schwarz and Strack (1999), show that situational factors can have an in uence on SWB responses. An important task is to understand how such transient, situational factors interplay with more chronic cultural in uences in affecting SWB responses. Another topic that begs for systematic research is the in- uence of the social settings on SWB reports across cultures. East Asian cultural members who are highly sensitive to self-presentational concerns (Suh 1999), for instance, may report their SWB differently depending on the nature of the interpersonalsurvey setting. An example of a method to assess the in uence of impression

8 Measuring Subjective Well-being to Compare Quality oflife 9 management is to vary the degree of anonymity in responding and determine how it in uences the reports (Park, Upshaw, and Koh 1988). Research paradigms used in socialcognition, such as reaction time measures, delayed memory paradigms, and priming methods (e.g., see Oishi, Wyer, and Colcombe 1999; Robinson 1999) can also be used to assess the cognitive processes leading to satisfaction responses. If we understand the processes by which SWB judgments are made, we will be in a much stronger position to understand the differences in the responses between individuals and between cultures. Although many of the methodological problems have been barely addressed in empiricalresearch, we feelthat the chapters in this book indicate that interesting ndings have nevertheless emerged. The measures and methods seem suf cient to have produced some meaningfuland fascinating results. We believe, however, that it is time for more rigorous methodology in this area, and we suggest that de nitive conclusions will be possible only after this occurs. In-depth ethnographic work can help craft measures that are appropriate to various cultures, but we also need to develop these measures into batteries for assessing subjective well-being that can be used across cultures. We believe that some of the greatest progress on subjective well-being in the decades to come will be based on sophisticated measurement work across societies in which the scales derive from sophisticated theories. Overview of the Book We begin the book with a chapter by Harry Triandis (chapter 2) because this work presents an extensive overview of many of the factors that might in uence subjective well-being across cultures. There are data to support some of Triandis's conjectures; other variables represent promising avenues for future research. As always, Triandis, one of the leading gures in cross-cultural psychology, brings creativity to his broad model of SWB. Chapter 3 by Charlotte Ratzlaff, David Matsumoto, and colleagues provides a de nition of culture and SWB, and highlights the importance of considering the signi cant individual variation that exists within all cultures. The second section of the book is focused on differences in how SWB is experienced across cultures. Eunkook Suh (chapter 4) addresses one important variable, the self. He nds that factors such as self-esteem and self-consistency, which are both believed to be central to optimal functioning in the western nations of Europe and North America, are not such strong correlates of life satisfaction in East Asian cultures. Suh also shows how the relation of affective happiness and life satisfaction

9 10 Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh varies across societies. In brief, individualists use their emotions more to judge their life satisfaction, whereas collectivists tend to rely more heavily on social appraisals. Following this lead, Shigehiro Oishi (chapter 5) demonstrates that feelings of autonomy are correlated with well-being in individualistic cultures, but not in collectivistic cultures. Oishi nds that positive social relationships, however, are equally important in both collectivistic and individualistic cultures, suggesting the idea that some variables may be universally related to the experience of well-being. Shinobu Kitayama and HazelMarkus (chapter 6) take the most radicalculturalposition in advancing the notion that both ``well'' and ``being'' must be de ned in cultural terms, and therefore that the very texture of subjective well-being varies across cultures. These authors suggest that well-being is necessarily de ned in social terms in all societies, and that a person's quality of life is de ned collaboratively with others, not simply from an internal frame of reference. This argument meshes nicely with Suh's nding that respondents in collectivistic cultures are more likely to use norms and the social appraisals of others in evaluating their SWB, whereas those in individualistic societies are more likely to heavily weight the internal frame of reference arising from one's own happiness. The next section of the book contains four chapters that ask whether speci c societal conditions generally lead to SWB in the nations of the world. Ronald Inglehart and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (chapter 7) propose several provocative hypotheses, and marshalevidence for them. First, they suggest that SWB is necessary for stable democracy, and that political systems are likely to collapse if many people within a nation are dissatis ed over a period of time. Their second nding complements the rst: stable democracies are likely to experience higher levels of SWB, and unstable political circumstances lead to very low average levels of SWB. Thus SWB may be both a cause and consequence of stable democratic governance. Because the conditions of nations so clearly in uence average levels of well-being, Inglehart and Klingemann deduce that genetic in uences are not the sole contributors to longterm subjective well-being. In chapter 8 Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi review evidence on the relation of income to SWB: between nations, within countries, and over time. Two ndings are noteworthy: wealthy nations are happier on average than poor ones, and yet SWB increased very little in the richer nations over the last several decades, even though wealth expanded spectacularly. Shalom Schwartz and Gila Melech (chapter 9) introduce worry as one aspect of subjective ill-being. They demonstrate that micro worryðconcerning threats to self and close othersðand macro worryðconcerning

10 Measuring Subjective Well-being to Compare Quality oflife 11 threats to society or the worldðare distinguished in fourteen nations. They discuss how violations of human rights, income inequality, and in ation lead to high levels of micro worry but have little effect on macro worry. Strikingly, cultural values affect worry levels more powerfully than objective life conditions do. Cultural egalitarianism and harmony lead to low micro worry and to high macro worry. In chapter 10 Ruut Veenhoven provides an examination of how freedom may in uence feelings of well-being. Although Veenhoven nds that the economic freedom of nations is related to the average levels of well-being in them, he nds that broader notions of freedom, including politicaland personalfreedoms, are related to higher SWB in wealthier nations but not in poorer ones. In the nalsection of the volume, severalindividualdifference variables are discussed in terms of their relation to subjective well-being across nations. Richard Lucas and CarolGohm (chapter 11) use a meta-analytic strategy in which nations are treated as separate studies in order to analyze differences in subjective well-being due to sex and age across countries. In two data sets severalgeneraltrends appear to occur across most nations. Alexander Grob (chapter 12) explores the relation of feelings of control to happiness in European adolescents, and hypothesizes that feelings of control are increasingly important as societies become more individualistic. Thus the chapters of the book examine broad factors that in uence the general well-being of most nations, as well as variables that have a differential in uence across cultures. We hope that readers from all societies will gain a degree of subjective well-being from reading the chapters of this volume. The Authors It is tting that a book on culture and well-being be authored by scholars from diverse nations. Ed Diener is from the United States. Although Eunkook Suh recently joined the faculty at the University of California, Irvine, in the United States, he was born and grew up in South Korea, and also lived for a time in Indonesia. Although several of the authors hail from North America (Gohm, Inglehart, Lucas, Ratzlaff, and Markus), two of the Americans have their roots in other nations: Triandis is originally from Greece, and David Matsumoto is of Japanese ancestry and has lived in that nation. The other authors, and the nations of which they are citizens, are Alexander Grob (Switzerland), Shinobu Kitayama and Shigehiro Oishi (Japan), Shalom Schwartz and Gila Melech (Israel), Hans-Dieter Klingemann (Germany), and Ruut Veenhoven (the Netherlands).

11 12 Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh References Balatsky, G., and Diener, E Subjective well-being among Russian students. Social Indicators Research 28: 225±43. Diener, E., Napa-Scollon, C. K., Oishi, S., Suh, E. M., and Dzokoto, V. (in press). Positivity and the construction of life satisfaction judgments: Global happiness is not the sum of its parts. Journal ofhappiness Studies. Diener, E., Sapyta, J., and Suh, E Subjective well-being is essential to well-being. Psychological Inquiry 9: 33±37. Diener, E., and Suh, E Measuring quality of life: Economic, social, and subjective indicators. Social Indicators Research 40: 189±216. Diener, E., Suh, E. M., Smith, H., and Shao. L Nationaldifferences in reported subjective well-being: Why do they occur? Social Indicators Research 34: 7±32. Edgerton, R. B Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth ofprimitive Harmony. New York: Free Press. Eid, M., and Diener, E The derivation of latent class analysis for comparisons across cultures: The case of subjective well-being. Manuscript, University of Trier, Germany. Oishi, S., Wyer, R. S., and Colcombe, S Cultural variation in the use of current life satisfaction to predict the future. Manuscript, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ouweenel, P., and Veenhoven, R Cross-national differences in happiness: Cultural bias or societal quality? In N. Bleichrodt and P. J. D. Drenth, eds., Contemporary Issues in Cross-cultural Psychology, Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, pp. 168±84. Park, K. B., Upshaw, H. S., and Koh, S. D East Asian's responses to western health items. Journal ofcross-cultural Psychology 19: 51±64. Robinson, M. D Short-duration valenced primes can in uence life satisfaction: Normative and personality in uences on judgment. Manuscript, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sandvik. E., Diener, E., and Seidlitz, L Subjective well-being: The convergence and stability of self-report and non-self-report measures. Journal ofpersonality 61: 317±42. Schwarz, N., and Strack, F Reports of subjective well-being: Judgmental processes and their methodological implications. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz, eds., Well- Being: The Foundations ofhedonic Psychology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 61±84. Shao, L. Multilanguage comparability of life satisfaction and happiness measures in mainland Chinese and American students. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Suh, E. M Culture, identity consistency, and subjective well-being. Manuscript. University of California at Irvine. Suh, E. M., and Diener, E The use of emotion and socialappraisalinformation in life satisfaction judgments: Joining culture, personality, and situational in uences. Manuscript. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Vijver, F. V. D., and Leung, K Methods and Data Analyses for Cross-cultural Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

12 This excerpt from Culture and Subjective Well-Being. Ed Diener and Eunkook M. Suh, editors The MIT Press. is provided in screen-viewable form for personal use only by members of MIT CogNet. Unauthorized use or dissemination of this information is expressly forbidden. If you have any questions about this material, please contact