“LIFE SATISFACTION” AND “PERSONAL HAPPINESS” IN THE SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING
The article is devoted to the actualization of methodological issues of using the indicators “life satisfaction” and “personal happiness”. In sociological studies they play (either individually or as part of indices) the role of a generalized (general, integral) indicator of subjective well-being, in contrast to particular ones. The features of the relationship of these indicators are considered at the country, group (the basis for the selection - lifecycle stages) and individual levels. The articlejustifies the expediency (for sociological measurements) of the introducing of a two-dimensional space, highlighting segments in it, on which a very definite character of the relationship between life satisfaction and happiness is observed. Compared with other existing indices based on the diﬀerence in answers to direct questions about “life satisfaction” and “personal happiness” orthe arithmetic mean, the proposed model is a “logical” index. The advantages of this construct in mass surveys are: procedural transparency, which facilitates the detection of atypical situations; the priority of quality over quantity when highlighting qualitatively homogeneous groups (according to a generalizedindicator); avoiding the artificiality of the construct; avoiding “summation”. The empirical base is the data of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) (2017) and European Social Survey (2016).