[Online Book] Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience (2013)

From the Overview at the National Academy Press

Description

Subjective well-being refers to how people experience and evaluate their lives and specific domains and activities in their lives. This information has already proven valuable to researchers, who have produced insights about the emotional states and experiences of people belonging to different groups, engaged in different activities, at different points in the life course, and involved in different family and community structures. Research has also revealed relationships between people’s self-reported, subjectively assessed states and their behavior and decisions. Research on subjective well-being has been ongoing for decades, providing new information about the human condition. During the past decade, interest in the topic among policy makers, national statistical offices, academic researchers, the media, and the public has increased markedly because of its potential for shedding light on the economic, social, and health conditions of populations and for informing policy decisions across these domains.

Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experienceexplores the use of this measure in population surveys. This report reviews the current state of research and evaluates methods for the measurement. In this report, a range of potential experienced well-being data applications are cited, from cost-benefit studies of health care delivery to commuting and transportation planning, environmental valuation, and outdoor recreation resource monitoring, and even to assessment of end-of-life treatment options.

Subjective Well-Being finds that, whether used to assess the consequence of people’s situations and policies that might affect them or to explore determinants of outcomes, contextual and covariate data are needed alongside the subjective well-being measures. This report offers guidance about adopting subjective well-being measures in official government surveys to inform social and economic policies and considers whether research has advanced to a point which warrants the federal government collecting data that allow aspects of the population’s subjective well-being to be tracked and associated with changing conditions.

Related articles

• Data on people’s self-reported ‘experienced’ well-being could help inform policies (sciencedaily.com)
• Political economy of happiness (knrajlibrary.wordpress.com)
• Subjective Well-being (venitism.blogspot.com)
• Self-reported ‘experienced’ well-being could help inform policies (medicalnewstoday.com)
• ‘Gut instinct’ makes for happy relationship, researchers say (irishtimes.com)
• Mindfulness: State or trait? (mentalworkout.com)

 

Medical Researchers Tune Into the Internet Buzz

Medical Researchers Tune Into the Internet Buzz – WSJ.com

From the 16 April edition of the Wall Street Journal

Looking for medical information on Internet message boards can be risky for consumers. Some of it is confusing, misleading or downright wrong. But for medical researchers, all that chatter can yield some valuable insights.

Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, for example, are mining message boards and Twitter feeds to see what breast-cancer and prostate-cancer patients are saying about herbal and nutritional supplements—including whether they take them and why and what side effects they encounter.

“People are often hesitant to talk to their doctors about herbs and supplements. But they do talk with other people, especially in an anonymous setting like a discussion board,” says principal investigator John Holmes, an epidemiologist and medical-information specialist. Even if there is no scientific evidence to support what people post, he says, “it’s useful to identify areas that would merit further study with all scientific rigor.”…

….

Chatter on the Web also can serve as an early warning sign of adverse events linked to drugs or medical devices. “We see patient conversations on the Internet as the largest post-marketing study ever,” says Michele Bennett, chief operating officer of Wool Labs, a business-intelligence company founded in 2007. The Wayne, Pa., firm can search the entire Internet for conversations that shed light on patient beliefs, buying patterns or decision making—whatever its clients, many of them drug companies, are seeking.  Wool Labs also can search Web chatter retrospectively to see how attitudes changed over time…

…

Analyzing Web conversations does raise ethical and privacy issues; people who talk candidly about their medical problems online may not realize it is a public forum. That is why the Penn researchers mine only discussion sites that require participants to register and explicitly state in their terms of use that any information posted will become public. The programs also filter out any posts or tweets placed by “bots” that are advertisements in disguise; containing a URL to another site is a telltale sign

The team also devised an “anonymizer” program that scrubs out any names, locations or other identifiers…

Related articles

• Social media and medical research, a story from Oz (simondenegri.com)

Don’t know much about eScience? free recorded online webinar available

From the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/NLM) Greater Midwest Region Online Education Web page

Don’t Know Much About eScience? (January 20, 2011)

• e-Science is an emerging research methodology with an emphasis upon data and networks. As researchers in biomedicine and other health-related disciplines increasingly utilize today’s technology in their work, they produce immense amounts of data that can, ideally, be shared and repurposed to speed up scientific discovery. Similarly, they use networking tools to find, develop and work in a collaborative environment no longer constrained by geographical limitations. Can health sciences librarians with their skills in information management and organization, as well as success in building partnerships across areas, find a role in this new area? The answer is “YES!” Presenter: Sally Gore.
  Recording: https://webmeeting.nih.gov/p57352616/ – the audio did not work properly, but it was captioned.
  Resources supplied by Sally Gore: GMR eSciences webiner resources.