> tehom@... (Tom Breton (Tehom)) writes:
>>On the other hand, even though I summed it up in the word "happiness" or
>>"satisfaction", the phrase "better off", to me, would cue a response
>> about
>>my personal circumstances more than one about my emotions. How would you
>>cue respondents more strongly to focus away from their recollections of
>>their emotions?
>
> By not asking them to do intertemporal comparisons. You appear to have
> suggested doing those comparisons in order to solve problems associated
> with measuring emotions.
> For measuring circumstances other than emotions, it's unclear what
> problems
> you're worried about.

It seems to me that satisfaction reports are implicitly some sort of
intertemporal comparison. Or at least the alternative bases for
satisfaction reports are worse: interpersonal comparisons ("Keeping up
with the Joneses" as the foundation of GDP+?) and comparisons to
situations that have not actually been experienced.

Anyways, I suggested comparisons to specific times in order to eliminate
one source of variance. It's not so much that one person might baseline
their satisfaction against last year and another against 5 years ago, it's
that the collective baseline might change. If (say) society is going thru
a period of nostalogia for the 50's and therefore the 50's is felt to be a
natural baseline to a greater degree than it otherwise would be, that
shouldn't be reflected in GDP+.

Tom Breton (Tehom)