What’s Special About Happiness as a Social Indicator?

@article{Helliwell2018WhatsSA,
  title={What’s Special About Happiness as a Social Indicator?},
  author={John F Helliwell},
  journal={Social Indicators Research},
  year={2018},
  volume={135},
  pages={965-968}
}
  • J. Helliwell
  • Published 1 February 2018
  • Sociology, Psychology, Economics
  • Social Indicators Research
Abstract Measures of subjective well-being, and especially life evaluations, or judgments about how happy people are with their lives as a whole, enrich and empower social indicators research. They do this by requiring other social indicators as explanatory variables and providing a coherent encompassing framework within which the relative importance of other social indicators can be established. 
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What is Happiness? Why is Happiness Important?
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A new public-use dataset for community-level life satisfaction in Canada is presented, based on more than 500,000 observations from the Canadian Community Health Surveys and the General Social Surveys, revealing robust differences in life satisfaction between and across urban and rural communities.
The Role of Social Capital and Remote Chinese Villagers’ Well-Being
Evidence on income and different forms of social capital associated with subjective and objective well-being calls for a recalibration in the policy balance between targeting different types of…
Translating Idea into Reality? A Q-Methodological Investigation of Chinese Local Officials’ Response to the Initiative of a Happiness Index
This research attempts to provide insights into the extent to which the novel idea of happiness indices has been translated into reality, a topic that arguably remains under-explored in happiness…
Nonprofits: A Public Policy Tool for the Promotion of Community Subjective Well-being.
Looking to supplement common economic indicators, politicians and policymakers are increasingly interested in how to measure and improve the subjective well-being of communities. Theories about…
The good life in rural and urban Senegal: A qualitative and quantitative study
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The results indicate that, against all expectations, life satisfaction is better in the Senegalese Ferlo than in the capital, Dakar, and this difference may be the joint result of less meaningful social comparisons and a relationship with nature as a source of stress restoration in rural areas.
Replies to Our Commentators
AbstractThis paper is written to briefly summarize comments made on our paper “Fifty years after the social indicators movement: Has the promise been fulfilled? An assessment and an agenda for the…
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