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palladias comments on Parenting and Happiness - Less Wrong Discussion
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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).
You are referring to the experience sampling method, which is regarded as the gold standard in happiness research. Over the last two months, I have used this method to measure my own happiness (here's how).
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.