On the Trail of the Gold Standard for Subjective Well-Being

Abstract

The absence of a 'gold standard' for subjective well-being has severely hampered the interpretation of data from empirical studies. This paper demonstrates a remarkable consistency among the results of 16 studies that have investigated 'life satisfaction' among large samples drawn from the general population. It is concluded that a population standard for 'life satisfaction' can be expressed as 75.0 ± 2.5 percent of the measurement scale maximum score.