Short happiness and affect research protocol (SHARP)

Issues in the measurement of subjective well-being (SWB) include the relative balance between scale brevity and measurement accuracy. Because accuracy is expected to vary negatively with the length of a scale, the brevity/accuracy trade-off has pragmatic implications for survey research. This article begins by examining minimal psychometric criteria to evaluate short measures of SWB. These criteria include content validity (i.e., four basic categories are cited), criterion validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability. Several measures frequently used in large-scale surveys are shown to fail against one or more of these criteria. Consequently, a new brief measure was developed and shown to satisfy all the criteria. It is termed the Short Happiness and Affect Research Protocol (SHARP). This measure contains 12-items derived from the Memorial University of Newfoundland Scale of Happiness (MUNSH), with the content balanced over positive and negative, and short-term (affective) and long-term (dispositional) components. The internal consistency, temporal stability, and criterion validity coefficients for the SHARP are comparable to those of the MUNSH, which is among the most accurate measures of self-reported SWB.