Activity, Time, and Subjective Happiness: An Analysis Based on an Hourly Web Survey

抄録

This paper investigates how people's happiness depends on their current activities and time. For this aim, we conducted an hourly web survey, where 70 students reported their happiness every hour on a day every month from December 2006 to February 2008. This method is an extension of experience sampling method (ESM) in that it uses mobile phones and personal computers. Our newly method has the same merit of ESM that can measure real time happiness data and escape from reflection and memorial bias. Using our newly method, we can obtain diurnal happiness data of respondents and also grasp their behavior at each of their reporting time during 14 months. Analyzing the data of our survey, we found (a) happiness significantly depends on activities, hours, and months, (b) while most of the time-variation of happiness is attributed to time pattern of activities, happiness varies with hours in a day, even when activities are controlled. (c) while activities affect similarly both genders, there are gender gaps of diurnal happiness pattern, after controlling activities.