Happiness and life satisfaction: understanding the effects of questionorder on subjective wellbeing measures in India

Subjective wellbeing measures arepopular tools for assessing quality of life and progress in societies. There are concerns aboutthe validity of answers to questions about happiness and life satisfaction because thesemeasures might suffer from biases during survey administration. This study used a surveyexperiment to understand if measures of life satisfaction and happiness suffered from contexteffects during the administration of a survey in Uttar Pradesh, India, and test the use of a bufferquestion to mitigate any bias. In addition, we examined the association of life satisfaction andhappiness with key socio-economic variables as a further means of validation. While happinessappears to be robust enough to not be influenced by the context, the question on life satisfactionsuffered from mild context effects. The buffer question proved to be able to mitigate this bias.Mental and physical health are significantly correlated with both happiness and life satisfaction.Education is strongly correlated with life satisfaction. Major negative life shocks are stronglyassociated with happiness but not with life satisfaction. This study makes a significantcontribution to the evolving scholarship on subjective wellbeing measurement in a non-WEIRDsetting, by clarifying two critical issues: the conceptual distinction between different subjectivewellbeing measures (happiness and life satisfaction), and their contextual sensitivity. The resultslead to two recommendations that should be considered when measuring subjective wellbeing:happiness and life satisfaction are different concepts, and should not be used interchangeably.Evaluative measures of subjective wellbeing can be context-sensitive. To avoid context effects, it is critical to put the context-sensitive question early in the questionnaire, or to add a buffer/transition question preceding the context-sensitive one.