What we know about context effects in self-report surveys of well-being: comment on Deaton and Stone
评论Deaton和Stone关于情境效应的研究，指出传统心理测量指标（如信度）不能保证自评幸福感测量不受情境影响，强调检验情境效应的理论和应用价值。
Subjective well-being (SWB) judgements are thought to reflect people's overall evaluation of the quality of their lives from their own perspectives. Despite the fact that SWB measures are inherently subjective , self-reports of this construct are not automatically and necessarily valid. People who respond to survey questions about their well-being must accurately assess their own subjective state and then translate that state into a response on a questionnaire item. As many researchers have noted, this process is not always straightforward ( Schwarz, 1999 ). People may not be able to accurately assess their internal feelings, they may wish to hide or distort these feelings for an external audience, or they may have trouble translating their internal state to a discrete response option. Thus, a major focus of SWB researchers has been the investigation of the psychometric properties of the measures used. When judged by most traditional psychometric criteria, established SWB measures perform well: they are reliable in most populations, they are responsive to changes in life circumstances, and they cohere with measures obtained using non-self-report techniques ( Diener et al. , 2009 ). As Deaton and Stone (2016 , this issue) note, however, strength in these traditional metrics does not guarantee that measures are free from psychometric problems. A measure of life satisfaction could potentially have extremely strong reliability (as indexed by test–retest stability coefficients), while still suffering from substantial context effects like those demonstrated in their article. Thus, research that explicitly tests these context effects—research like that presented in Deaton and Stone—is important for both applied and theoretical reasons.