Validation of a Measure of Subjective Well-Being: An Abbreviated Version of the Day Reconstruction Method

Abstract

BackgroundThe study of well-being is becoming a priority in social sciences. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) was developed to assess affective states. The aim of the present study was to validate an abbreviated version of the DRM designed for administration in population studies, and to assess its test-retest properties.Principal Findings1560 adults from Jodhpur (India) were interviewed using an abbreviated version of the DRM, and a week later they were re-interviewed using the original long version of the DRM, after which the abbreviated version of the DRM was compared with the original version. A regression model considering interaction terms was employed to analyse the impact of sociodemographic characteristics on net affect. Test-retest reliability was assessed, and found to be moderate. Positive affect showed more test-retest reliability than negative affect, while net affect had more temporal stability than U-index. The affect of sets A, B, and C, taken together, had a moderate predictive ability compared with the affect obtained using the full version of the DRM: AUC = 0.67 for positive affect; 0.66 for net affect; 0.61 for negative affect; and 0.60 for the U-index. Household income, gender, and setting all had a significant impact on net affect.ConclusionsNet affect and positive affect showed moderate temporal stability, whereas negative affect and the U-index showed fair temporal stability. Evaluating the affective state using the abbreviated version of the DRM provides a profile of the population similar to that of the full version. The results provide considerable support for using the short version of the DRM as an instrument to measure subjective well-being in large population surveys.

Measuring Time Use in Development Settings

“…However, an abbreviated version of the DRM, designed by researchers at the World Health Organization (WHO), has been implemented in several developing countries (Miret et al 2012;Ayuso-Mateos et al 2013). The abbreviated DRM, however, lacks several of the innovations that made the DRM such an innovative tool for measuring time use and for reducing the risk of recall bias.…”

Measurement Invariance of the Day Reconstruction Method: Results from the COURAGE in Europe Project

“…In light of these scientific uncertainties and given the -elsewhere exposed (AyusoMateos et al 2013;Miret et al 2012;Caballero et al 2014) -evidence on the DRM psychometric properties, the hypotheses that guided this work were: 1) it is expected that scores produced by the abbreviated version of the DRM allow to confirm there is measurement invariance across three European countries under study: Poland, Finland and Spain; 2) differences in positive and negative affect scores will be found across samples, reflecting real differences among the three compared countries; 3) the affect structure measured by the abbreviated DRM questionnaire will remain invariant in each country when comparing different time frames, and when considering different days of the week.…”

“…However, the DRM is a time-consuming tool (Diener et al 2010;Miret et al 2012)-taking from 45 to 75 minutes to be completed (Kahneman et al 2004)-which is also expensive, like other instruments of its class, such as the Princeton Affect and Time Survey (Krueger and Stone 2008).…”

“…Most of the countries showed a similar diurnal variation of affect, with a tendency to improve throughout the day ). This brief version has the advantage that it can be used in large studies with representative samples of the population worldwide: evaluating the affective state using the abbreviated version of the DRM provides a profile of the population similar to that obtained with the full version, while the different scores in the measures which can be considering the affect scores obtained using the full version of the DRM as gold standard (Miret et al 2012). Other previous work analyzed the psychometric evidence of the abbreviated Spanish version of the DRM, applied in Mexico and Spain .…”

“…Moreover, dimensionality studies on the brief version of the DRM have, to date, focused on factorial structure and reliability Miret et al 2012); while positive affect, negative affect or net affect scores (Kahneman et al 2004), have been used to report differences between samples, but a deeper assessment of measurement invariance among the study groups is missing.…”