The happiness turn? Mapping the emergence of “happiness studies” using cited references

Abstract

This article analyzes "happiness studies" as an emerging field of inquiry throughout various scientific disciplines and research areas. Utilizing four operationalized search terms in the Web of Science; "happiness", "subjective well-being", "life satisfaction" and "positive affect", a dataset was created for empirical citation analysis. Combined with qualitative interpretations of the publications, our results show how happiness studies has developed over time, in what journals the citing papers have been published, and which authors and researchers are the most productive within this set. We also trace various trends in happiness studies, such as the social indicators movement, the introduction of positive psychology and various medical and clinical applications of happiness studies. We conclude that "happiness studies" has emerged in many different disciplinary contexts and progressively been integrated and standardized. Moreover, beginning at the turn of the millennium, happiness studies has even begun to shape an autonomous field of inquiry, in which happiness becomes a key research problem for itself. Thus, rather than speaking of a distinct "happiness turn", our study shows that there have been many heterogeneous turns to happiness, departing in a number of different disciplines.

Measuring Welfare Beyond GDP

“…As we will show, this report supports the objective measurement of welfare. The report can be contrasted with international trends where subjective measures of wellbeing and quality of life are today used ubiquitously throughout multiple scientific disciplines, some even arguing that there has been a 'happiness turn' in the social sciences (Ahmed 2010;Kullenberg and Nelhans 2015). Consequently, the 2015 report was met with strong opposition as it was circulated in a round of expert referrals.…”

“…If people return to the same levels of happiness and life satisfaction, even if their objective circumstances change (for better or for worse), the measurements have no meaning for planning the welfare society. However, even though this discussion has been returned to since at least the 1970s, subjective measurements have been implemented as standard measurements throughout the social and medical sciences in numerous studies (see Kullenberg and Nelhans 2015), and they have become ubiquitous indicators in a number of international reports.…”

“…At the turn of the millennium, the fields of Social Indicators Research along with 'happiness studies' had presented increasing amounts of research on subjective well-being and life satisfaction, as subjective alternatives to the established practice of measuring welfare as consisting of predominantly objective indicators. From the fields of psychology and sociology came proposals for socalled subjective factors to be included as national indexes (see for example, Diener 2000), which in turn relied on a line of research that had emerged over the past four decades (Kullenberg and Nelhans 2015). As we will show, this 'subjective turn' would impact policy in Sweden in 2015, as new measurements of welfare were investigated in a government report commissioned by the Ministry of Finance, which serves as the locus of this article and as entry point into the controversy between subjective and objective indicators of welfare.…”

Happiness Studies

“…In the recent decades, empirical studies on happiness have increased significantly (Kullenberg and Nelhans 2015). Several social science disciplines, such as psychology, economics, public health, political science, and to some extent also sociology, have participated in this surge.…”

“…These scales measured life satisfaction and affect, a combination which covered one of the most central concepts in contemporary happiness studies: Subjective well-being (SWB). Psychologist Ed Diener (see especially Diener1984; Diener et al 1999), who is also the single most cited author in the field of happiness studies(Kullenberg & Nelhans 2015), is perhaps the best-known advocate of the concept of SWB. In a 1984 article, he defined SWB as consisting of two entirely subjective aspects: satisfaction with life and positive affect.…”