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jkaufman comments on Parenting and Happiness - Less Wrong
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One approach to studying happiness I've seen is giving people buzzers that go off at random intervals and prompt people to rate how happy they feel right now on a 10 point scale. Researchers usually average these datapoints to judge how happy the people are.
Now, per Kahneman, we know that this is a way to survey the experiencing self, but the remembering self doesn't rank experiences by averages. I don't know of any study that uses happiness buzzers to compare groups by peak-end ratings (nor am I sure what the 'end' should be -- maybe an average of the last day's datapoints).
I started rating happiness on a ten point scale in response to a randomized buzzer four months ago and am expecting a child in the next few weeks. I intend to keep up the sampling.
Any updates?
I eventually got annoyed at the interruptions and stopped, but only about a month ago, 11 months after the baby was born.
http://www.jefftk.com/happiness_graph is up to date with the final samples
I think the rise up to December 2013 was mostly me getting used to the scale I was using.
The baby was born 3/26.
There's no data from periods when I was asleep or trying to sleep, which misses out on the main source of unhappiness: night-time wakings.
The period with no data is data loss from a broken phone -- with TagTime I needed to do manual backups which I didn't get around to very often. This lost data was for a chunk of my paternity leave, sadly.
The low point in late january corresponds to my mother dying; the high point before that corresponds to lots of family being around for the holidays.