Author: tom

I always promised myself that I’d never do any research involving questionnaires.

Well, times change and we’ve all done things for money which we might not have done otherwise. So I’ve been running these huge postal-questionnaire surveys and gathering hundreds of thousands of data points and wondering what sense can be made of the morass of information.

Why the previous distaste for questionnaires? Well, true to the behaviourist-roots which i share with all experimental psychologists, I don’t have a lot of faith that people’s answers to questionnaire questions bare much relation to the thing that we, asking the questions, are interested in. The vagaries of personal intepretation, context, ambiguities in wording, differences in perspective between researcher and respondent add so much noise – why should i believe that the average response on a particular question reflects anything more than the willingness of the average respondent to tick that part of the response scale on that question?

(by the way, this is common, useful and potentially unhealthy aspect of the experimental psychologist’s trade: a complete distrust of people’s professed desires and beliefs. Just because they said they’ll vote Labour / choose to do that job for that reason / are a kind and conscientious person / etc you don’t actually believe them do you??).

Anyway, does that mean that my 200,000 data points are a load of junk? It means that i think that most of the survey data reported in the news is a load of junk. 75% of people think this. 2 in 3 people think that. etc etc. Junk. So, why not my stuff?

Well, it’s all about statistics and differences. Admittedly the point someone marks on a questionnaire may bare little relation to the thing the question refers to, but we can demonstrate that there is consistency in how people answer certain questions. Further than this, there are systemmatic differences in how different groups of people answer questions. By looking at differences, we can stop worrying about the reponse to the questionnaire as an indicator of wider meaning, and focus on the existence of differences between different people’s responses as indicators of wider meaning. Sure, if someone asks “How worried are you about water pollution” then my response is pretty meaningless, whether I indicate 1 (not at all) or 7 (extremely). If I ask 200 people, then the average response is still pretty meaningless. But if I find that the 100 Guardian readers give a statistically higher response than 100 Telegraph readers then that says something about the world. Anyway, maybe this was obvious to the social psychologists all along, but if it was they never told me.

In the first place, it seems clear that people’s self-report of how happy they are is a fairly valid measure of their happiness. It correlates highly with the perception of family and friends, with the incidence of pathologies and relevant behaviours – in short, people who think they are happy also look and act like happy people are supposed to. They tend to be extroverted, they have stable relationships, the live healthy and productive lives. So far so good.

Although, if i was an extrovert with stable relationships and a healthy and productive life, I think i’d be happy too! Any proof that this is causation not correlation?

But there might be some interesting downsides as well. For instance, one of the most widely accepted definitions of happiness is that it is a state in which one does not desire anything else. Happy people tend not to value material possessions highly, are less affected by advertising and propoganda, are not as drive by desire for power and achivement. Why would they? They are happy already, right? The prospect of a society of happy people should be enough to send shivers down the spine of our productive system, built on ever-escalating consumption, on never-satisfied desire.

Would like to see the references for this. Seems just a little too convenient for the liberal world-view to me. I bet happy people would value their material possessions highly if there was a threat that they would be taken away – likewise i’d be less happy and value material possessions more if i didn’t possses any. I don’t see why you can’t have a kind of happiness which is based on activity (including consumption), rather than on a lack-of-desires (contentment?)

Will academic psychology be of any help in providing answers to these impending choices?
…Among the the things we learned is that people who are engaged in challenging activities with clear goals tend to be happier than those who lead relaxing, pleasurable lives. The less one works just for oneself, the larger the scope of one’s relationships and commitments, the happier a person is likely to be.

This much, I think, is well supported by the evidence. But why can’t shopping be a challenging activity with clear goals. I think Csikszentmihalyi in this paragraph is contradicting his assertion in the one i’ve quoted here as proceeding it. True, relationships, commitments and a lack of selfishness suggest that shopping is probably not the best route to happiness, but happy people will still desire stuff, i’m sure.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2002). The Future of Happiness. In J. Brockman (Ed.), The next fifty years, pp. 85-92. New York: Vintage