14
search activities. As for episode satisfaction, the unemployed report lower net affect scores
across all activities. We find that the differences in the net affect measure between the two
groups are statistically significant (at least at the ten-percent level) for almost all activities
(except hobbies, voluntary work, and job seeking).
As we laid out in Section 2.1, the net affect measure calculates the difference between the
average intensity of all positive and negative emotions. Thus, this measure implicitly allows
one strong negative feeling to be compensated by two, perhaps relatively weak, positive
emotions, even though one strong negative feeling might dominate all other emotions. The U-
index avoids this problem by indicating only whether the strongest of all emotions was a
negative one. Table 2 shows that the ranking of activities according to the U-index does not
change much compared to the rankings by episode satisfaction or net affect.9 For the
employed, leisure activities have a U-index of less than 0.1 (except for childcare). This means
that the strongest feeling is a negative one during less than 10 percent of the time spent in
these activities. The U-index for work and work-related activities is much higher. During
working time, people report that their strongest feeling is a negative one 21 percent of the
time. This value is even slightly higher during commutes, and reaches 45 percent during job
search activities. For the unemployed, the U-index is higher for all activities (again, except
childcare). Job search also has the highest U-index for the unemployed (44 percent).
Statistically, the differences between the U-indices for the employed and the unemployed are
not as strong as for the other two measures because the binarization of the well-being scores
eliminates a lot of information.
Table 3: Correlation between well-being measures
|
Net Affect |
U-index |
Episode Satisfaction |
Life Satisfaction | |
|
Net Affect |
1 |
--- |
--- |
--- |
|
U-index |
-0.74 |
1 |
--- |
--- |
|
Episode Satisfaction |
0.73 |
-0.52 |
1 |
--- |
|
Life Satisfaction |
0.32 |
-0.27 |
0.32 |
1 |
Note: The correlations are calculated at the individual level.
9 Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient between the U-index and episode satisfaction is 0.66 for the employed
and 0.82 for the unemployed. Comparing the U-index and net affect gives rank correlations of 0.74 for the
employed and 0.93 for the unemployed.