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Lecture by Richard Lucas

Date: Time: 16:00 Location: Simon building, S 8

Rich Lucas is one of the most widely cited researchers worldwide in the area of well-being. He did his PhD in 2000 under the supervision of Ed Diener at the University of Illinois in Urbana, IL. He currently works at Michigan State University, where he is MSU Foundation Professor, and he is also affiliated with the German Institute for Economic Research.

His core research topic is subjective well-being, which is at the heart of the Herbert Simon Research Institute. Within this broader topic, he studies the measurement of well-being, the effect of life circumstances on well-being, and the association between personality and well-being. He frequently uses longitudinal and large-scale survey data to answer his research questions. His research is thus very relevant for various departments and research lines within TSB. See an overview of his publications.

Title: "How to Measure Happiness: Comparing Global Reports to Experiential Measures"

Abstract: Happiness and subjective well-being have typically been assessed using global self-reports that ask respondents to think about their lives as a whole. These global reports can be contrasted with experiential measures that assess mood and emotion as they occur or soon after, as implemented in experience sampling or day reconstruction methods. Because global, retrospective reports require respondents to remember and aggregate across many different moments, it is often assumed that experiential measures improve upon the validity of global reports. I review some recent studies that assess specific threats to validity that might affect global reports, and I describe a series of studies that compare different types of experiential measures to both global reports and external criteria. These comparisons show that global and experiential measures each have distinct strengths and weaknesses.