Posts Tagged ‘Happiness’

Choice modelling and quality of life

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Happiness is one of the hottest areas of economic research. But simply asking people how happy they are is inadequate, says Dr Terry Flynn. Understanding how people choose between competing versions of their lives is a far more accurate way of delving into their psyches.

It ought to go without saying that the aim of social policy and government regulation is to increase society’s general level of well being. Good policy has positive impacts, reaching much further than its immediate consequences. A well-planned and well-delivered health policy that supports the families of patients suffering from terminal illness leads to greater aggregate quality of life and more community happiness. Bad policy does the opposite.

For this and other reasons, happiness has become a growth area of research in economics and the social sciences over the past few years. Suddenly, everyone wants to know what lies behind human contentment, and how to measure and improve it. Happiness scales have risen to dizzying heights of popularity of late; however, their aim – to reflect general sentiment and well being – can be easily lost through the use of numeric scales to elicit responses and collate data.

Happiness research usually asks respondents to choose a number between zero and 10 to indicate how happy they are with their life at that moment. The way people measure their levels of happiness, however, can give very different pictures.

Personal point of view

Each respondent will have a different personal frame of reference in giving his or her response, and such personal reasons are often lost in interpreting the data. For example, survivors of traumas such as war may put on a brave face, measuring their personal levels of happiness in peacetime using a different frame of reference than people who have never experienced war. Evidence suggests that simply reaching old age tends to make people rate their happiness highly.

Cultural cues

People may assign meanings and superstitions to numbers – for example, the number eight is significant in Buddhist and Chinese cultures – and decisions to choose or avoid these numbers affect survey results.

Meaninglessness

Happiness scales have no theory behind them. If a person scores seven out of 10, what does that mean? What are the statistical properties of numbers on the scale? Happiness scales offer limited choice to respondents to express what’s important to them. For the respondent scoring seven, what explains the missing three out of 10? Happiness scores don’t tell us what a person values. Not knowing what’s missing from the person’s life, it is impossible to know what improvements might make that person happier.

The scores don’t allowus to predict future demands, trends, or ways to make product and service delivery more efficient and relevant.

Irrelevance

Often, happiness scales lead to ‘ecological fallacies’. Differences in scores between, for example, married and divorced people are meaningful only at high levels of aggregation, typically at an entire-population level. It is an ecological fallacy, therefore, to infer that such differences are relevant to me or my peer group. I want to know what the differences in scores are among people like myself, not for the ‘average’ Australian.

So what is happiness?

Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard defines a happy person as ‘anyone who enjoys inner peace’. Such a person ‘is no more broken by failure than he is inflated by success’, because he ‘understands that experiences are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them’. – Matthieu Ricard, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill

What’s that got to do with good policy and innovation? British psychologist and author of Affluenza, Oliver James, rejects happiness as a policy goal for other reasons. High average happiness scores have been observed in those countries with the greatest inequality and highest rates of depression. Instead, he advocates policies that improve four aspects of life:

  • connectedness to people: good relationships and feeling part of a community;
  • autonomy: being independent and in control of your own life;
  • experience: feeling you can make a difference and that there is value in what you do; and
  • security: material and emotional.

Just like the trend to ‘think positive’, happiness scales leave out important ingredients of life. They allow people to focus overly on material gain or hedonistic enjoyment, ignoring the
other three key sources of durable wellbeing in a population.

Qualitative and quantitative choice modelling offers a solution to the limitations of happiness scales. Choice modelling empowers people to say what they want and how much they’re willing to contribute, personally and financially, to making it happen. ‘ICEPOP’ and ‘ICECAP’ might sound like they’d be more at home in Antarctica than in Australia (see box copy, next page), but they are revolutionary instruments being employed by policymakers and innovators alike. ICECAP instruments expand on happiness-rating scales to get a much more intimate measure of a respondent’s quality of life. They give a more realistic cross-section of community sentiment and allow us to hone in, with a person-by-person, topic-by-topic degree of accuracy, on what people like and dislike, what they do and don’t find important to their wellbeing.

Results from ICECAP instruments are based on a well-tested theory of decision-making and cannot be manipulated. With the ICEPOP team, I’ve developed both ICECAP instruments over the past decade, building on the choice-experiment and capability-approach work of Nobel Prize for Economics laureates Daniel McFadden (2000) and Professor Amartya Sen (1998).

Working from the vantage point of measuring respondents’ perceptions of their quality of life, ICECAP instruments help us explore how to maintain and improve services into the future. At CenSoC, we have been developing new instruments for measuring Australians’ perceptions of their quality of life.

Our aim is to first develop a picture of survey-respondent types. The holy grail is a robust, longitudinal set of data that allows us to measure how different types of Australians perceive their quality of life, and how their values and norms change over time. This data will allow us to advise governments on how to plan for the future based on what people value.

Companies will also benefit from data about what people want most. We have developed a specialised measurement and valuation instrument that will allow us to build up individual scales for respondents, based on discrete answers designed to give a true sense of their lives. In our current research, we are presenting people with 16 different lives and asking them to imagine living in each and decide which aspects of each life would be best and worst to live with.

Our survey of 2,400 randomly selected Sydney residents, commissioned by the Independent Public Inquiry, Long-Term Public Transport Plan for Sydney (2010), reflected an overwhelming preference for public-transport solutions to the city’s congestion crisis. Almost two-thirds of respondents expressed a willingness to pay more for better public transport and to consider congestion charges to improve it, but were opposed to paying more for the existing public transport, which received a resounding vote of dissatisfaction.

Already, our work at CenSoC is attracting national media attention and being tested in the following public-policy areas:

  • comparing quality of life, nationally and internationally;
  • eliciting preferences for public-transportation systems;
  • valuing patient and citizen preferences for health-care reform;
  • valuing water supplies;
  • measuring quality of life for young people; and
  • developing personality and compatibility scales.

Ultimately, at CenSoC, we’d like to have a personalised scale to help us understand the differences in the norms of quality of life among Australians. Our research aims to yield a longitudinal and quality measure of wellbeing for the nation, to inform policymakers and innovators about where real differences are in the community. Choice modelling can seed new approaches to service delivery for the best quality-of-life outcomes, letting us have our cake and eat it too.

ICEPOP and ICECAP: not frozen treats

The ICECAP measures we use in our happiness research are conceptually linked to Amartya Sen’s capability approach, which defines wellbeing in terms of an individual’s ability to do and be the things that are important in life.

Investigating Choice Experiments for Preferences of Older People (ICEPOP-O)

In the ICEPOP team at the University of Bristol, UK, between 2001 and 2009, I used choice experiments to elicit the preferences of older people in various studies. For the main study, we developed a quality of life instrument: the ICEpop CAPability instrument for Older people (ICECAP-O). It focused on general quality of life since older people typically received a mix of social and health-care interventions.

In our research, we tried to distill the essence of people’s responses, developing five dimensions from which to measure the data:

  • attachment (love and friendship);
  • security;
  • enjoyment;
  • role (doing things that make one feel valued); and
  • control (independence).

The quantitative work for the ICECAP instruments uses a model that effectively measures how often people choose one of these quality of life dimensions over another.

ICEpop CAPability instrument for All adults (ICECAP-A) We repeated the original study to construct an instrument for adults of any age. The quality of life research we are doing at CenSoC is at the world forefront of what’s going on in this area. Sen stressed that it is a person’s capability to achieve key aspects of life, such as being independent, having relationships, that is important, rather than the amount they might choose to engage in those aspects.

In developing ICECAP-A, five key aspects of life were identified from qualitative work with people, which were similar to those in ICECAP-O:

  • Can respondents have close relationships?
  • Can they have their independence?
  • Can they achieve and progress in life?
  • Can they feel secure in life?
  • Can they have enjoyment in life?

We then get each person to indicate how much of each dimension they can have and assess them against their scale to score and value their quality of life. Our approach will offer a completely new way for politicians and medical decision-makers to measure how people are coping on a day-to-day basis.

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Dr Happy and Mr Percival

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

On Thursday July 15, the Business21C community was treated to a hugely entertaining, uplifting and enlivening double act: Dr Happy, aka UTS Adjunct Professor Dr Timothy Sharp, and his friend and inspiration Darren Percival, otherwise known as vocal artist Mr Percival. While Dr Happy appealed to the intellectual side of the audience, presenting well-researched and reasoned arguments for the practice of happiness in everyday life, Mr Percival just did it – giving the audience something to smile about there, then and afterwards.

Happiness is a choice we make everyday. It’s a matter of practice, active positivity, of looking for the bright side, of not settling for just OK. Happiness is not necessarily about optimal human functioning. It’s about thriving and flourishing despite whatever context you’re in. It’s about enjoying the good times, but getting through the bad times as well as you can.

Psychology has traditionally focused on fixing the negative – ensuring an absence of distress or anxiety, depression or other psychological problems. Positive psychology aims for better than well, to ‘play above the line’, in the parlance of Dr Happy’s Happiness Institute.

He believes that a key obstacle to many people’s happiness is ‘the tyranny of when…’ the addictive but destructive belief that ‘I’ll be happy when… I have more money, a bigger house, a better job, when I get that promotion, when I lose some weight, when I find the love of my life or [insert pretty much anything you like here!]’.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with aspiring to be and to have more, the problem is that many people never achieve their goals because they’re too focused on the future and not focused enough on the here and now; and even if they do achieve their goals, many then think of something else that they ‘need’ before they can really feel happy. Does that sound familiar?

Dr Happy has developed a new approach; an approach that involves getting happy first. The premise is that by creating positivity in the first instance you’ll be more likely to achieve your goals. And there’s even more good news; this idea is supported by well-conducted, valid and reliable scientific studies. It doesn’t just sound good, it actually works. The aim of the game, says Dr Happy, is to have at least three positive emotions or experiences for every three negative ones.

‘The greatest risk is not that we will aim too low and hit, but that we don’t aim at all, too many people stumble through life, wander along… do you want to live an okay life, stumbling across happiness every now and again, or do you want to create a great life, a meaningful and purposeful life, one one in which we connect with others?’

To add to all this practical advice, Dr Happy invited a special and inspirational friend, Mr Percival, a vocal artist of national renown, to provide the audience with practical experience in creating happiness – there and then.

Darren Percival has achieved an outstanding reputation in Australia as an artist, musician, vocal coach and jazz singer of talent, imagination and skill. With over twenty years of professional experience, he has worked as an entertainer, recording artist, singing teacher and innovator with resounding results. A childhood spent in Mexico inspired the canvas for Darren’s ‘spontaneous vocalisation’, and recording monthly cassette tapes for family and friends back home in Australia propelled his fascination with recording the human voice and being able to play it back.

The Business21C audience experienced live, first hand, the inspirational impact music and practical positivity can have on their lives.

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The primacy of positivity

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Don’t wait until you succeed to feel good. Get happy now and turbo-charge your chances of achieving your goals, says Professsor Timothy Sharp.

The main obstacle to happiness is the tyranny of when, or deferred happiness. It’s the phenomenon that allows us to think: ‘I’ll be happy when…’, when I have more money, when I have a bigger house, when I have a better job, when I lose some weight, when [insert pretty much anything you like here].

The problem is, few people ever get to their ‘when’; and those that do think of something else they need to achieve before they allow themselves to feel happy.

It’s what positive psychologists call the hedonic treadmill, likening the experience to being stuck on a treadmill chasing a carrot, but never actually getting anywhere.

Such a life not only denies us the joy or satisfaction we seek, but deferring positive emotions like happiness increases frustration, disappointment and downright misery. (How else would you feel if you constantly chase a wonderful reward or prize but never quite get your hands on it?).

Nonetheless many people adopt this unsuccessful and unhelpful approach, and since we’ve been taught that if you work hard, you’ll achieve your goals, and if you achieve your goals you’ll be happy, perhaps its not that surprising.

Yet years of working with individuals and organisations trying to find happiness and achieve success have taught me that the path to success and productivity, and indeed the answer to many of life’s problems, may lie along the opposite path: the creation of positive emotions and experiences as a first step to authentic happiness. Its what I have come to call the primacy of positivity.

The primacy of positivity is an approach which allows us to get happy first, and as a result increase our chances of achieving our goals, not the other way around. The good news is this isn’t something I have dreamed up from nowhere. It is supported by the inspirational research of Dr Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina, and others, and particularly Dr Fredrickson’s work on ‘broaden and build theory of positive emotions’. Let me explain further.

Psychologists have traditionally focused on negative emotions and as a result, we know quite a bit about how they affect us. In short, when we experience negative emotions (such as fear or anxiety) we close up; we tend to withdraw physically and psychologically and so we don’t cope as well. Broaden and build has developed from the investigation of positive emotions and led to the discovery that positive emotions lead to improved performance, enhanced coping and greater resilience via a broadening of our cognitive processes and an increased capacity to build on previous experiences.

What this means is that positive emotions do not just help us to enjoy the good times, they help us to cope with the tough times. As a result, positive emotions are not just phenomenon we should enjoy after we’ve achieved something of significance, they are tools we can use to increase our chances of achieving outcomes of significance.

(And before going on, in order to address another concern within the positive psychology field, the pursuit of positive emotions on their own may lead to selfishness rather than authentic happiness, it’s worth also noting a related field of fascinating research that indicates that those who experience positive emotions also have a positive effect on others via social and emotional contagion. That is, when we feel good, we’re more likely to make others feel good.)

These are findings of profound significance because they mean that rather than succumbing to the tyranny of when, we can harness the power of then: that is, we can create happiness first, then we can achieve more of our goals (not to mention help others achieve their goals). How great would that be? We get to enjoy the wonders of positive emotions before, during and after succeeding in our efforts.

Accordingly, I encourage you – and your clients and colleagues – to try the following tips from my book 100 Ways to Happiness: a guide for busy people, to increase your experience of positive emotions and, as a result, your chances of achieving your goals:

  • Set yourself a small, achievable goal, something you can achieve within less than an hour (the sense of satisfaction you get will motivate you to go on and achieve something bigger)
  • Reflect not just on what you’re trying to do but also, on why; being aware of your purpose will inspire you to focus
  • Engage in some form of exercise, preferably something you enjoy. Exercise is a powerful mood enhancer and stress reducer.
  • Meditate, relax, laugh, listen to music or dance!
  • Imagine yourself at your best in a world that’s just as you’d like it to be
  • List at least three good things about you and your life
  • Write down as many things as you can think of for which you’re grateful (happy people focus much more on what they have and less on what they don’t have)
  • Do something good to or for someone else; be kind and/or generous to someone. Happiness isn’t just feeling good, it’s also doing good.
  • Give some thought to what you’re best at and how you can use this more in your everyday life

So there it is; don’t wait until you succeed before you find happiness. Find ways to make yourself happy first and then discover real success!

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