A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method
Kahneman and colleagues built the Day Reconstruction Method to solve a measurement problem. Asking people how satisfied they are with life gets a judgment shaped by comparison and expectation; interrupting them repeatedly to ask how they feel right now gets the experience but is expensive and intrusive. This method has people reconstruct the previous day as a sequence of episodes, using procedures designed to limit the distortions of ordinary recall, and rate how they felt during each. Validating it against nine hundred employed women, the results corresponded closely to those from real-time sampling at a fraction of the cost. The paper also demonstrates its use on the question of whether people adapt to their circumstances. It is a methods paper, and it matters to this vault because a great deal of what is claimed about what makes people happy depends entirely on which of these measures was used.
Kahneman and colleagues built the Day Reconstruction Method to solve a measurement problem. Asking people how satisfied they are with life gets a judgment shaped by comparison and expectation; interrupting them repeatedly to ask how they feel right now gets the experience but is expensive and intrusive. This method has people reconstruct the previous day as a sequence of episodes, using procedures designed to limit the distortions of ordinary recall, and rate how they felt during each. Validating it against nine hundred employed women, the results corresponded closely to those from real-time sampling at a fraction of the cost. The paper also demonstrates its use on the question of whether people adapt to their circumstances. It is a methods paper, and it matters to this vault because a great deal of what is claimed about what makes people happy depends entirely on which of these measures was used.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., Schkade, D. A., Schwarz, N. & Stone, A. A. (2004). "A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: the Day Reconstruction Method." Science, 306(5702), 1776-1780. 909 employed women. Cited here only as background to the closing point about measuring moment-to-moment experience.
Where we use it
- Why You Remember the End of a Holiday and Not the Middle, Why We Come Back
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The source
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1103572
DOI: 10.1126/science.1103572