The Happy Lawyer
Happiness Assessment
First, have you taken the assessment already? If not, here it is:
If you have, you’re probably looking for explanations, right? Well, you’re in luck - because we have explanations! (no guarantee as to their satisfactoryness).
Originally I was going to create my own assessment (filled of variations of “Are you happy? [yes/no]” 😬) before I realized that there were plenty of people who’d already spent a lot of time looking into this. We leveraged and combined their work, and then slimmed it down to make it manageable.
Let’s dig in.
What Actually IS Happiness?
Good question (one I’ve considered myself over here). Why start here? Because we can’t measure something properly if we don’t know what we want to measure.
It’s my view that most of the lawyers looking to be “happier” weren’t looking to just fill their life with states of pleasure, but rather they were looking to be content and satisfied with who they were, what they’d done, and where they were going.
What does that look like in practice? 🤔
I believe it’s a combination of your satisfaction with your life as well as the emotions you actually experience as you go through life. With luck and research, I found the OECD’s guide to measuring subjective well-being and decided to use it as a base.
There were other options. The WHO has a Quality of Life Assessment that seemed potentially useful. But when I looked at the actual questions, they just didn’t seem as appropriate for what we’re trying to do (they looked a little more at the health and everyday living (e.g. sex-life and transportation) and less at emotions and overall satisfaction). The life-satisfaction measures just seemed more on point.
But of course, none of this is set in stone. If it seems like the questions are missing the mark, we will happily revisit which ones we’re using.
The Questions
Annex B to the OECD’s guide to measuring subjective well-being had a number of recommended sample questions. Great! 🙌
I put all the questions into an online tool and clapped my hands with success, only to realize it was way too long.
😒
So I had to make some judgment calls:
I kept their entire section (Module C. Affect) which deals with emotions. It was just 10 questions which seemed a reasonable balance between getting a detailed assessment but not getting too much.
I also made the decision to ask about these emotions on a week time-frame. They had asked about it just for the day but their test is designed to get a representative sample of the population (where bad days and great days would statistically “come out in the wash”), whereas I am hoping to get a representative answer for each person who takes the test.
Interestingly, there are 6 questions assessing negative affect and only 4 questions assessing positive affect. As they say on p.257, “There are more negative than positive questions, reflecting the fact that negative affect is intrinsically more multi-dimensional than positive affect.” Cool.
I also decided to merge their Core Questions (Module A), Life Evaluation questions (Module B), and a few of their Eudaimonic well-being questions (Module D) before splitting them apart into two sections:
General Life Satisfaction covering life generally.
I inserted one of my own questions here (the only question I created outside of the happiness hygiene section) - namely “overall, how happy are you?” since I wanted at least one question that directly just asked about happiness.
Domain-specific Life Satisfaction, which asks specific domains of life (e.g. job, standard of living, relationships, etc). I was worried that the assessment was getting too long and was tempted to get rid of this section, but my gut tells me that we’re going to find something really valuable across one or more of the domains by the time we’re done.
Finally, I decided to insert some of my own questions that I believe cover key aspects of happiness hygiene. The better your score is, the more likely you are to sustain or grow your happiness. Unlike the other three categories, these questions are entirely created by me based on my research and/or intuition which suggests they deserve being investigated further.
How is it scored?
Overall Weighting Between Subscores
I don’t know if there’s a right answer to this. But here’s how I chose to weight it:
General Satisfaction Subscore - 38%
Domain-Specific Satisfaction Subscore - 18%
Emotional Affect Subscore - 38%
Happiness Hygiene Subscore - 6%
You’ll note a few things:
That ‘life satisfaction’ in total outweighs ‘affect’ by an approximate 3:2 ratio. I’m okay with this since emotions come and go and I believe that how we perceive our life (i.e. our satisfaction with it) is very influential on whether we feel happy (even when we have difficult days where we experience difficult emotions).
That General Satisfaction Subscore received 40% while the Domain-Specific Satisfaction Subscore received only 20%.
Why the difference? I believe that most of us generally have a feeling as to whether we’re satisfied with our life as a whole, and that it’s this feeling that we base how we feel.
Additionally, a domain doing awesome (e.g. someone falling in love) or terrible (e.g. someone getting divorced) will likely end up impacting the general scores anyway. Based on that, I want the domain specific questions to have a real impact on the overall score without taking it over and I judged 20% was the right number for that.
That the Happiness Hygiene comprises a very minor comment of the overall score. This is in part because these questions were created by me (as opposed to created by researchers and subsequently approved by the OECD). My research and intuition suggests that we keep track of them, but until more causation (or even correlation) can be established - it’s probably a bit too early to include them into the official score in any material respect.
Specific Scoring - General Life Satisfaction Subscore
This subscore is comprised of two equally weighted categories:
The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) (5 questions):
All questions were weighted equally in this category.
The OECD states: “The SWLS is one of the best-tested and most reliable multi-item scales of life evaluation, has a higher reliability than single item measures, and is more robust to inter-personal differences in scale interpretation than a single-item measure.” Great!
Why not only include the SWLS then? The OECD continues: “It should be noted, however, that this is not a balanced scale, and there is a slightly increased risk of acquiescence/socially desirable responding due to the use of an agree/disagree scale format.”
The other 6 general life satisfaction questions:
Each question was weighted equally. I wondered whether to weight the first two questions (i.e. “overall how happy are you” and “overall, how satisfied are you”) more heavily, but decided to wait and see if that’s appropriate.
Specific Scoring - Domain-Specific Subscore
All 9 questions related to specific domains of your life were weighted equally.
Specific Scoring - Emotional Affect Subscore
The Emotional Affect Subscore was comprised of two equally weighted categories:
The 4 questions regarding “positive emotions” and
The 6 questions regarding “negative emotions”.
Arguably this overweights each positive question compared to each negative question, but I think it’s the right call to weigh positive and negative equally (otherwise the score would skew more towards the presence or absence of negative just because it’s more multi-dimensional).
Specific Scoring - Happiness Hygiene
All 11 questions were weighted equally.
Thoughts?
I’ve put a fair bit of thought into the test. What do you think about it? What do you think of the choices I’ve made?
Haven’t taken it? Take it now. It’s even got a button for if you’re not a lawyer so that non-lawyers can participate without messing up the lawyer-specific data. Have you taken it a while ago? Maybe it’s time to take it again and see how your answers have changed.
A Note on Privacy
The assessment is administered by a tool called involve.me and they store all information received through the assessments. Additionally, involve.me sends your email and your name to our email service provider (we use convertkit). We will never sell your personal information, nor will we share it without your consent. We only plan to use it for research and work related to The Happy Lawyer book and the Leader Rising business.