Bridging the gap between critical and applied approaches in the science of well-being: An analysis of evaluative subjective well-being measures

Abstract

This article examines three recurring arguments for evaluative subjective well-being (swb) measures: instruments that ask respondents to broadly assess their lives, such as the Cantril Ladder and general life satisfaction questions. To organise the debate and support better dialogue between critics and supporters of these instruments, we draw on two conceptual tools from the philosophy of well-being: the distinction between constitutive and determinative questions, and the characterisation of well-being as a thick concept. The first argument we analyse holds that leaving the object undefined is desirable (a "non-paternalistic" approach). We argue that this stance legitimately declines the constitutive question about well-being, but that in delegating it to respondents it makes engagement with that question a precondition for interpreting the resulting scores. The second argument holds that the absence of a clear definition is not disqualifying, given large samples, respondents' familiarity with the relevant expressions, and the instruments' psychometric properties. We argue that each support admits an alternative explanation grounded in the social rules governing well-being talk, and that no thin, purely descriptive construct lies beneath the everyday expressions these measures rely on. The third argument holds that the measures are useful regardless of these limitations. Here we distinguish an agnostic stance, for which scores are a means of predicting other outcomes, from a score-as-target stance, for which raising the scores is itself the end. The agnostic stance declines constitutive questions successfully, at the price of abandoning well-being as the central object of research; the score-as-target stance cannot, since it must still say why this quantity rather than another deserves to be raised. From these analyses, we propose two practices to bridge critical and applied approaches: making constitutive commitments explicit, and exercising greater rigour in the use of words and expressions.