Towards personalised happiness: An idiographic approach to change in satisfaction

Abstract

Abstract Contemporary approaches examining the determinants of happiness have posited a bi-directional theory wherein happiness is determined by both top-down and bottom-up processes. We propose a personalised happiness perspective that the determinants and consequences of happiness are idiographic (i.e. specific) to each individual rather than assumed to be the same for all. We demonstrate the utility of personalised happiness by testing the bi-directional theory of happiness at both the population and personalised levels using representative data of nearly 60,000 German, British, Swiss, Dutch, and Australian participants tracked up to 30 years. The majority of participants (73.0% - 86.3%) showed primarily unidirectional associations between domain satisfactions and life satisfaction, and only 3.6%-5.8% participants showed primarily bi-directional associations. Moreover, the population models correlated weakly with personalised models, suggesting that aggregated, population-level research fails to capture personalised happiness, demonstrating the feasibility and theoretical importance of a personalised happiness approach.