{"doi":"10.3386/w28438","title":"What Do Happiness Data Mean? Theory and Survey Evidence","abstract":"What utility notion-e.g., flow/lifetime, self/family-centered-do self-reported well-being (SWB) questions measure? Existing applications make different assumptions regarding the (i) life domains,(ii) time horizons, and (iii) other-regarding preferences captured by SWB data. To obtain relevant evidence, we ask survey respondents what they had in mind regarding (i)-(iii) when answering commonly used-life satisfaction, happiness, ladder-and new SWB questions. We find that respondents' self-reports differ from researchers' assumptions, and differ across SWB questions and sociodemographic groups. At the same time, simple SWB-question wording tweaks are effective in moving self-reports towards desired interpretations. We outline actionable suggestions for SWB researchers.","journal":"National Bureau of Economic Research","year":2021,"id":213371,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":23,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9073,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":805995,"name":"Jakina Debnam Guzman","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":643292,"name":"Marc Fleurbaey","orcid":"0000-0002-5342-8065","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":805301,"name":"Ori Heffetz","orcid":"0000-0003-1487-4238","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":557552,"name":"Miles Kimball","orcid":"0000-0002-7585-1585","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":6125,"name":"Daniel J. Benjamin","orcid":"0000-0002-2642-5416","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":96,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:52:36.886828Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}