This book draws together the latest work from scholars around the world using subjective well-being data to understand and compare well-being across countries and cultures. Starting from many different vantage points, the authors reached a consensus that many measures of subjective well-being, ranging from life evaluations through emotional states, based on memories and current evaluations, merit broader collection and analysis. Using data from the Gallup World Poll, the World Values Survey, and other internationally comparable surveys, the authors document wide divergences among countries in all measures of subjective well-being, The international differences are greater for life evaluations than for emotions. Despite the well-documented differences in the ways in which subjective evaluations change through time and across cultures, the bulk of the very large international differences in life evaluations are due to differences in life circumstances rather than differences in the way these differences are evaluated.

This volume is concerned with quality of life, and focuses on subjective well-being (people's own evaluations of their lives in terms of happiness and satisfaction). The first section focuses on theories of subjective well-being, and on testing these theories. The second section of the volume concentrates on how work, unemployment, and income influence subjective well-being. The third section of the book concerns two important institutions that have an impact on people's well-being - the health care and political systems. Authors from diverse disciplines present their views and research concerning quality of life, and focus on subjective well-being (people's happiness and satisfaction). The chapters cover topics ranging from theories of happiness, and data bearing on these theories, to the organization of the political system. Income, work, health care, and leisure are considered as they influence well-being. The effects of temperament, people's values and goals, and life events are also treated. There is an international flavor to the volume, with authors from several nations and data gathered from diverse societies. The findings of the volume are relevant to academic researchers as well as to those working in applied areas who want to improve quality of life.

In this volume, the authors explain the reasons why subjective indicators of well-being are needed. They describe how these indicators can offer useful input and provide examples of policy uses of well-being measures. They describe the validity of the subjective well-being measures as well as potential problems. The authors then delve into objections to the use of subjective well-being indicators for policy purposes and discuss why these objections are not warranted. Finally, they describe the measures that are currently in use and the types of measures that are most likely to be valuable in the policy domain. The volume will be of interest to researchers in psychology and economics.

This volume is concerned with quality of life, and focuses on subjective well-being (people's own evaluations of their lives in terms of happiness and satisfaction). The first section focuses on theories of subjective well-being, and on testing these theories. The second section of the volume concentrates on how work, unemployment, and income influence subjective well-being. The third section of the book concerns two important institutions that have an impact on people's well-being - the health care and political systems. Authors from diverse disciplines present their views and research concerning quality of life, and focus on subjective well-being (people's happiness and satisfaction). The chapters cover topics ranging from theories of happiness, and data bearing on these theories, to the organization of the political system. Income, work, health care, and leisure are considered as they influence well-being. The effects of temperament, people's values and goals, and life events are also treated. There is an international flavor to the volume, with authors from several nations and data gathered from diverse societies. The findings of the volume are relevant to academic researchers as well as to those working in applied areas who want to improve quality of life.

Major Theoretical Questions Theories about subjective well-being have grown over the past several decades, but have been re ned only slowly as adequate data have been compiled to test them. We can characterize the theories describing happiness along several dimensions. The rst dimension is whether the theory places the locus of happiness in external conditions such as income and status, as many sociological theories do, or within the attitudes and temperament of the individual, as many psychological theories do. Some have maintained that people adapt to all circumstances over time, so that only individual personality matters for producing happiness, whereas others believe that economicandothersocietalfactorsarethedominantforcesinproducingwell-being. Throughout my writings there is a mix of both the internal and external factors that in uence well-being. A second dimension that characterizes scholarship on well-being is the issue of whether the factors affecting well-being are relative or absolute. That is, are there standards used by people at all times and places in judging their lives and in reacting to events? Or are standards dependent on what other people possess, on expec- tions, andonadaptationlevelsbasedonpastcircumstances?Again, thereisevidence supporting the role of both universal and relative standards. People around the globe are probably in uenced by common factors such as friendship versus loneliness, but even these universal in uences on happiness are probably subject to some degree of comparison depending on what the person is used to and what others have. However, some factors might be much more comparative than other in uences, as Hsee, Yang, Li, and Shen (in press) have describe

material boundaries capture cultural effects? The articles contained in this volume offer initial answers to most of these questions. The culture and well-being questions are of fundamental importance to understanding in the entire eld and to scienti c knowledge in the behavioral s- ences as a whole. Unless we understand what is universal and what is speci c, we cannot hope to understand the processes governing well-being. Unfortunately, our scienti c knowledge in most behavioral science elds, including the study of we- being, has been built on a narrow database drawn from westernized, industrialized nations. This means that we have only a little knowledge of whether our ndings are generalizable to all peoples of the globe and to universal human psychol- ical processes. Fortunately, during the last decade my students and I, as well as others working in this area, have rapidly expanded our knowledge of well-being vis-a-vis ` culture. The rst attempt to summarize the ndings in this area came in 1999 with Culture and Subjective Well-Being, a book edited by Eunkook Suh and Diener. The current volume represents a renewed effort to give a broad overview of major ndings in this area and to point to the important directions for future research. Composition of This Volume I am very pleased with the articles presented in this volume because I believe that they represent true advances in our fundamental understanding of subjective we- being.

The Sandvik, Diener, and Seidlitz (1993) paper is another that has received widespread attention because it documented the fact that self-report well-being scales correlate with a number of other methods of measuring the same concepts, such as with reports by knowledgeable "informants" (family and friends), expe- ence sampling measurement, and the memory for good versus bad life events. A single factor was found to underlie measures using different methods, and a n- ber of different well-being self-report measures were found to correlate with the non-self-report measures. Thus, although the self-report measures of well-being are imperfect, and can be in uenced by response artifacts, they have substantial validity as shown by their correlations with measurements based on alternative methods. Whereas the Pavot and Diener article reviewed the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Lucas, Diener, and Larsen (2003) paper reviews various approaches to assessing positive emotions. As we wrote in the chapter in this volume in which we present new measures, we do not consider any of the existing measures of positive affect to be entirely acceptable for measuring subjective well-being in the affect area, and that is why we have created and validated a new measure.