Towards an Optimal Measure for Subjective Well-Being: Experimental Evidence for Anchoring Effects.

Large-scale survey, such as the European Social Survey, The German Socio-Economic Panel, the Gallup World Poll, and the World Values Survey, all use slightly different questions wording regarding the happiness measures and life satisfaction measures. To improve credibility, the happiness field should come to a more consistent and optimal measurement of subjective well-being. In this study, we examine the impact of question wording  on the self-reported score and then extended it to the examination of response formats. A key contribution is the examination of the the effect of anchoring that is caused by the presence of the words 'happy' and 'life satisfaction' in the question. We check the validity of our results with eye-tracking.