Disclaimer

When you take our survey, you receive several scores that indicate your self-reported satisfaction with life, emotional affect and overall wellbeing.  You may compare these scores with the median of everyone who has taken the survey to that point.  If you compare scores with friends’ you should understand that they will not necessarily tell you which of you is happiest, because individual scores can vary widely based on your subjectivity in taking the survey.  On the other hand, when large numbers of people complete the survey, we can be confident that overall scores provide a quite reliable indication of life satisfaction in a community.

You will also receive scores based on ten domains of life, the conditions of which are understood to positively or negatively affect wellbeing.  If you score low in one or more of these domains, you should not understand that to mean you are unhappy, but rather that one or more of the basic conditions in your life may be at least temporarily out of balance.

You should consider these low scores as warning flags—do they indicate a chronic condition for you or are they temporary responses to particular moments in your life.  If you believe they are long-term (chronic time pressure, for example), you consider how you (or, if an entire community scores low in the domain, the community) should ask how the situation might be remedied.

Chronic time pressure, for example, can lead to deterioration of health, social connection, community participation and many other conditions of life which contribute to happiness.  In our WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY? section of the Web site we offer some suggestions for improving low scores in any of the domains.

Privacy 

Overall data from this survey will be analyzed and provided to media but your individual data will not be revealed to others. We ask for demographic data so we can analyze overall results, but we do not ask for your name, address, etc. Your privacy will be protected.

We follow the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC (European Union): Personal data collected for this survey is used only for the purposes of the project and as a part of an aggregate. All data is kept secure and individual responses are not shared.