Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/245683 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 14632
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Governments, multinational companies, and researchers today collect unprecedented amounts of data on human feelings. These data provide information on citizens' happiness, levels of customer satisfaction, employees' satisfaction, mental stress, societal trust, and other important variables. Yet a key scientific difficulty tends to be downplayed, or even ignored, by many users of such information. Human feelings are not measured in objective cardinal units. This paper aims to address some of the ensuing empirical challenges. It suggests an analytical way to approach the scientific complications of ordinal data. The paper describes a dichotomous-around-the-median (DAM) test, which, crucially, uses information only on direction within an ordering and deliberately discards the potentially unreliable statistical information in ordered data. Applying the proposed DAM approach, the paper demonstrates that it is possible to check and replicate some of the key conclusions of previous research—including earlier work on the effects upon human well-being of higher income.
Subjects: 
ordinal scales
satisfaction
subjective well-being
happiness
trust
corruption
robustness
JEL: 
C18
C25
I31
I39
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
235.15 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.