主观幸福感度量研究进展及其对智慧城市建设的启示

Measures of subjective well-being:a review

智慧城市在学术研究和政策制定中日益受到关注,已有研究侧重于将信息技术用于城市建成环境和人的行为分析,但鲜有研究关注城市居民的主观幸福感。为此,本文对现有关于主观幸福感的量表进行了系统梳理,并对不同形式量表的误差等问题进行了总结。目前的研究大多对生命满意度和情感幸福感分别加以度量。对生命满意度的度量主要采取单条或多条的反映性量表,以Cantril的自我标定梯形量表和Diener等的生命满意度量表为代表;对情感幸福感的度量也以反映性量表为主,包括单条的Gurin量表与多维度的核心情绪量表和PANAS量表。针对短期情感体验的调查,还发展了诸如经验取样法和日重建法等专门的方法。目前主观幸福感的量表仍以自陈量表居多,其中存在很多测量偏差。基于目前主观幸福感的量表体系和西方地理学中关于主观幸福感的研究进展,本文提出了值得未来国内人文地理学研究的几个话题和需要注意的问题。最后,探讨了主观幸福感的量表和相关研究对于智慧城市建设的启示。

In recent years, subjective well-being has attracted increasing attention in psychology, economics, and sociology. Geographical studies on the topic in English language is also growing rapidly. Since measurement is the foundation of empirical studies, this article reviews the major approaches to measuring subjective well-being.We first provide a theoretical framework of subjective well-being, in which two major components are identified: the cognitive component which is mainly known as life satisfaction; and the affective well-being which is usually termed as positive affect and negative affect. Each component can be further divided according to its temporal span. Previous studies mainly adopt self-reported scales to measure different components of subjective well-being, while some facial or ecological indicators are also developed to measure short-term emotions. The self-reported scales are quite flexible and probably provide the most proper insights into individuals' subjectively experienced well-being. These scales can be classified into two types: while the reflective scales select items based on a latent model, the formative scales consider the items as different facets which can be aggregated within an aggregate model or profile model. In general, more reflective scales of subjective well-being have been developed as compared to formative scales. The most widely used scales to measure life satisfaction include the single-item self-anchoring scale and the 5-item Satisfaction with Life Scale.Some formative scales such as the 8-item Personal Well-Being Index(PWI) were also developed to assess one's global life satisfaction. The most often applied measures of affective well-being include the single-item Gurin scale, the multi-item core affect model, and PANAS. Special methods such as the Experience Sampling Method and Day Reconstruction Method and artificial indicators such as U-index were also developed to measure emotional experiences in activity episodes. The current article also reviews the strengths and weakness of those measures. In order to reduce the biases and errors of measurement caused by respondents' cognitive process and the artificially assigned weights for various sub-domains, the multi-item reflective scales are recommended.However, future studies should develop better understanding of the convergence among various measures of subjective well-being. It is also necessary to pay more attention to the cognitive mechanism of evaluating global well-being and select proper models in empirical analysis. Based on the review of measures of subjective wellbeing and empirical studies in English literature, this article proposes some important topics and issues for future studies in Chinese human geography. This review article mainly contributes to existing literature by providing a framework to understand and design measures of subjective well-being and introducing some widely adopted scales which are readily available for the Chinese geographers to collect data in future studies. This article also points out that existing studies about smart cities mainly focus on the application of information technologies in the analysis of urban built environment and human activities. However, not many studies have investigated the question to what extent smart cities may promote people's subjective well-being. Therefore, the measures of subjective well-being summarized in this article may provide a pool of indicators to monitor national well-being and facilitate the development of smarter cities.