The Analysis of Human Feelings: A Practical Suggestion for a Robustness Test

Jeffrey Bloem and Andrew Oswald

No 14632, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Governments, multinational companies, and researchers today collect unprecedented amounts of data on human feelings. These data provide information on citizens' happiness, levels of customer satisfaction, employees' satisfaction, mental stress, societal trust, and other important variables. Yet a key scientific difficulty tends to be downplayed, or even ignored, by many users of such information. Human feelings are not measured in objective cardinal units. This paper aims to address some of the ensuing empirical challenges. It suggests an analytical way to approach the scientific complications of ordinal data. The paper describes a dichotomous-around-the-median (DAM) test, which, crucially, uses information only on direction within an ordering and deliberately discards the potentially unreliable statistical information in ordered data. Applying the proposed DAM approach, the paper demonstrates that it is possible to check and replicate some of the key conclusions of previous research—including earlier work on the effects upon human well-being of higher income.

Keywords: trust; happiness; subjective well-being; satisfaction; ordinal scales; corruption; robustness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C18 C25 I31 I39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-isf, nep-ltv and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: Review of Income and Wealth, 2022, 68 (3), 689 - 710

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Journal Article: The Analysis of Human Feelings: A Practical Suggestion for a Robustness Test (2022)
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