A Global Happiness Scale for Measuring Wellbeing: A Test of Immunity Against Hedonism

Wellbeing is gaining acceptance as an indicator of social and economic progress by many governments and agencies. As such the scientific community is actively engaging in developing scales to gauge wellbeing at a community and national level. A common approach used comprises of asking subjects a single question on happiness. A major issue with single questions is the difficulty to establish reliability. Recognising this issue, researchers have developed an itemised Global Happiness Scale (GHS) comprising of four items. GHS is reported to have satisfactory reliability and convergent validity and the scale has been translated into a number of different languages. However to ensure GHS is measuring happiness at a global level, that is measuring eudaimonic happiness, it is necessary to ensure it is immune to hedonic happiness. GHS had not been previously subjected to a hedonic immunity test, which the current study addressed. This paper reports and discusses the reliability and hedonic immunity of GHS.