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The economic literature generally recognizes three main components of well-being. Cognitive well-being (evaluative measures), affective well-being (emotional experience) and eudaimonic (sense of purpose). While many papers have been written about the relationship between income and cognitive well-being, generally finding a positive relationship, evidence for the relationship between affective well-being is less numerous and occasionally contradictory.
This project aims to establish the relationship between income and affective well-being using multiple datasets and estimation methods to identify common patterns. The primary analysis will be based on datasets containing Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) data, which is a method originally developed by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues. Participants record what they were doing over the course of a day in a time-use diary and also report their emotional experience in those (or some of these) episodes. The diaries are typically filled out shortly after the end of the day covered by the diary. This allows researcher to get a detailed picture of the emotional experience of participants with minimal recall bias. The analysis may be supplemented with datasets containing other types of data on affective well-being, such as Experience sampling Method (ESM) data, where respondents are contacted at various points throughout the day and asked to report their emotional experience in that particular moment.
Core questions to be addressed with these analyses are:
Are there systematic differences between how affective and cognitive well-being relate to income?
Are there plateaus in relationship or does the association change substantially beyond some level of income?
Following the purely descriptive analyses, this project will continue with a first tentative investigation of the reasons for the established relationships. Such as by analyzing differences in the time use of respondents across income levels.