These guidelines provide advice on the collection and use of measures of subjective well-being. They are intended to provide support for national statistical offices and other producers of subjective well-being data in designing, collecting, and publishing measures of subjective well-being. In addition, the guidelines are designed to be of value to users of information on subjective well-being.
The guidelines provide information on the validity of subjective well-being measures; discuss the main methodological issues in developing questions to collect information on subjective well-being; present best practice in the measurement of subjective well-being; and provide guidance on the analysis and reporting of subjective well-being measures. A number of prototype question modules relating to different aspects of subjective well-being are also included.
These guidelines should be viewed as providing advice on best practice rather than being a formal statistical standard. At present, countries differ in terms of how much interest they have in information on subjective well-being, and in terms of the ability of national statistical offices to collect such data. The role of the guidelines, therefore, is primarily to assist data producers in meeting the needs of users by bringing together what is currently known on how to produce high quality, comparable measures of subjective well-being. As an international governmental organisation, the OECD has a particular interest in encouraging international comparability of data, and this is one of the key objectives of this report.
