Pooling Time Series Based on Slightly Different Questions About the Same Topic Forty Years of Survey Research on Happiness and Life Satisfaction in The Netherlands

Tineke DeJonge (), Ruut Veenhoven, Wim Kalmijn and Lidia Arends

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2016, vol. 126, issue 2, 863-891

Abstract: Survey research on subjective wellbeing in The Netherlands started in the early 1970s. The time series happiness and life satisfaction that have emerged since then are unfortunately based on slightly different survey items of which one part uses verbal response scales and another part uses numerical response scales. The diversity of the survey items and a number of other measurement issues, such as the effects of changes in survey mode, hamper comparison over time and make it difficult to establish whether life became any better over the last forty years. These problems can be tackled using the recently developed Reference Distribution Method with which responses to equivalent but not identical survey questions can be pooled to obtain long, consistent time series. We applied the Reference Distribution method to pool time series of happiness and life satisfaction. We conclude that in the past 40 years the Dutch have become slightly happier and satisfied with their lives. Copyright The Author(s) 2016

Keywords: Rating scales; Comparability; Beta distribution; Reference distribution; Happiness; life satisfaction; Pooling time series (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11205-015-0898-5 (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:126:y:2016:i:2:p:863-891

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-015-0898-5

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 ().