Validation of a Brief Yesterday Measure of Hedonic Well-Being and Daily Activities: Comparison with the Day Reconstruction Method

Christopher Christodoulou (), Stefan Schneider () and Arthur Stone ()

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2014, vol. 115, issue 3, 907-917

Abstract: There has been increasing interest in the measurement of hedonic well-being (HWB), due in part to its broad implications in areas such as health and society. The day reconstruction method (DRM) is a validated technique assessing HWB and daily activities using instructions that help respondents recover their experiences from the previous day, thus reducing recall bias. Unfortunately, large-scale surveys are typically not able to implement the time-consuming DRM procedure; instead, they rely on single-item or very brief questionnaire assessment of HWB and time usage. Despite their wide use, brief questionnaires have rarely been compared to the DRM, which could provide validation of these short assessments. In the present study we compared these two questionnaire formats in 45 adults who completed both a DRM and a “hybrid” short form (HSF) questionnaire that included a very brief procedure to reconstruct yesterday’s events. Results were that the mean HSF ratings tended to overestimate HWB in comparison to the DRM, though effects were generally small to moderate. With regard to estimates of time spent on daily activities, the HSF also differed from the DRM, though with generally small to moderate effects. Correlations between estimates indicated that the HSF explained an average of almost half the variance in the DRM ratings for both HWB (rs ranging from .52 to .97) and time use (rs ranging from .43 to .85). In general, HSF ratings displayed considerable overlap with those of the DRM though the brief instructions apparently did not eliminate recall bias in the shorter questionnaire. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Hedonic Well-Being; Daily Activities; Day Reconstruction Method; Survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11205-013-0240-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:115:y:2014:i:3:p:907-917

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-013-0240-z

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().