Assessing Well-Being

Ed Diener is the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. He received his doctorate at the University of Washington in 1974, and has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois for the past 34 years. Dr. Diener was the president of both the International Society of Quality of Life Studies and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. Currently he is the president of the International Positive Psychology Association. Dr. Diener was the editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Happiness Studies, and he is the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science. Diener has over 240 publications, with about 190 being in the area of the psychology of well-being, and is listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists by the Institute of Scientific Information with over 12,000 citations to his credit. He won the Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, the first Gallup Academic Leadership Award, and the Jack Block Award for Personality Psychology. Dr. Diener also won several teaching awards, including the Oakley-Kundee Award for Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Illinois.

• – Measuring Well-Being: Collected Theory and Review Works.- Temporal Stability and Cross-Situational Consistency of Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive Responses.- Assessing Subjective Well-Being: Progress and Opportunities.- The Evolving Concept of Subjective Well-Being: The Multifaceted Nature of Happiness.- Review of the Satisfaction With Life Scale.- Subjective Well-Being: The Convergence and Stability of Self-Report and Non-Self-Report Measures.- Measuring Positive Emotions.- Experience Sampling: Promises and Pitfalls, Strength and Weaknesses.- Life-Satisfaction Is a Momentary Judgment and a Stable Personality Characteristic: The Use of Chronically Accessible and Stable Sources.- Happiness is the Frequency, Not the Intensity, of Positive Versus Negative Affect.- Income’s Differential Influence on Judgments of Life Versus AffectiveWell-Being.- New Measures of Well-Being.- Conclusion: Future Directions in Measuring Well-Being.

From the reviews: "Assessing Well-Being, is concerned with the measurement of life satisfaction. ... Also, newly written, they point the way for future research. ... Certainly academic researchers interested in well-being will find them extremely useful. ... The reprinted book chapters are not so readily available, so their inclusion is a real plus. The audience should extend beyond research psychologists and include policy makers as well as interested members of the general public. ... the collected works of Ed Diener are timely, impressive, and useful." (Christopher Peterson, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 54 (50), 2009)