This article is about the author's predicament about measuring subjective wellbeing of school children. The problem is that this is a subjective assessment and small variations can have many consequences because this type of research is used by many policy makers, teachers and educators. Also, the researcher, his helpers are human beings. Eventhough we try to be objective, our brains are wired in certain ways and we cannot deny that. So, I ended writing about the time I have spent thinking about my predicament.
Qualitative Research – the theory and predicaments of practice.
We as researchers have opinions, which may be the same of the collective society or it may be different. The predicament is will our opinions interpret the results or will they be skewed by our thinkng. Worst of all, we will never know. However, we will do our best to be honest and objective at all times.
The theory is that all human beings have a level of subjective well-being (SWB) which comprises the person's longer-term level of pleasant affect, lack of unpleasant affect, and life satisfaction. Current studies show that this changes from one time to another but generally stays within a range which has been set before birth, soon after birth or during preschool education. My predicament is that my findings will be less reliable and less useful if I did the measurements at the wrong time. One solution to this problem is have a large sample size, but this has it's own problems.
Subjective wellbeing displays moderately high levels of cross-situational consistency and temporal stability. This does not exclude pathological states but accept them as part of the psychological profile of that individual.
Studies have shown that self-reported measures of SWB have adequate validity, reliability, factor invariance, and are sensitivity to change.
There have been significant advances in techniques to measure subjective well being. However, this does not exclude further sophistication of techniques to improve measuring subjective wellbeing.
The affect of an individual includes facial, physiological, motivational, behavioral, and cognitive components. Most self-reports assess cognitive component of affect, and thus are unlikely to yield a complete picture of respondents' emotional lives because it is subjected to his interprettion at that time. One such example could be denial; denial may influence self-reports of SWB more than any other component. In other instances, emotions may be the responses which vary on a number of dimensions such as intensity, suggesting that mean levels of affect as captured by existing measures do not give a complete account of SWB. Progress in cognitive psychology indicates that differences in memory retrieval, mood as information, and scaling processes can influence self-reports of SWB.
Finally, theories of communication alert us to the types of information that are likely to be given in self-reports of SWB. These advances from psychology suggest that a multimethod approach to assessing SWB will create a more comprehensive depiction of the phenomenon. In the writers opinion a multifaceted test battery will yield more credible data.
Inconsistencies between various measurement methods and between the various components of well-being will both help researchers better understand SWB indictors and group differences in well-being. Finally, knowledge of cognition, personality, and emotion will also aid in the development of sophisticated theoretical definitions of subjective well-being.
For example, life satisfaction is theorized to be a judgment that respondents construct based on currently salient information. It is reasonalbe to conclude that measuring negative reactions such as depression or anxiety can give an incomplete picture of people's well-being, and that it is imperative to measure life satisfaction and positive emotions as well.
Finally, as I said at the start of my article, theory is one, meausriing subjective wellbeing and interpreting the results is another. Hope, I get lots of support from my supervisor and colleagues. It is a great job but it has it's anxieties.
